gran turismo christian movie review

Gran Turismo

Reviewed by: Alexander Malsan CONTRIBUTOR

Wish fulfilment story of a teenage Gran Turismo Playstation video game player

Based on a true story

Professional race car drivers at high skill levels

Loving your enemy / For a follower of Christ, what is LOVE —a feeling, an emotion, or an action?

Carrying burdens

The roles of parents

“From gamer to racer”

J ann Mardenborough ( Archie Madekwe ) has been through the ringer. I mean his father has been on his case about doing something meaningful with his life, not just sit and play video games. His mother tells him, “Why don’t you go back to university?” Jann’s been through that but grew tired of sitting in lectures and coursework. His father warns him, “Jann, if you don’t figure out what to do with your life and stop playing video games, you’re going to be working with me at my job.”

Jann loves video games and is obsessed with one video game in particular, “Gran Turismo,” a simulated racing game with all the actual feelings of driving a race car (e.g, how quick the acceleration is, the delay in shifting gears, the exact way it steers, the real physics of a racing car).

It just so happens that there is “Gran Turismo” tournament. This is no ordinary tournament. The top six winners, from all over the world, will be invited to attend the Nissan Academy where they will be put to the test. The prize? The driver that makes it through the Academy will be given a contract to drive for Nissan in all future races. Crazy, right? You wouldn’t be the first person to think so.

Crew Chief Jack Salter ( David Harbour ) thinks this idea is absolutely insane and dangerous. “You’re going to take a bunch of teens who have never driven a real car and strap them to a 200 mile an hour rocket?” he says to Nissan motorsport executive, Danny Moore ( Orlando Bloom ). “Yep,” Danny says. Eventually, however, Jack decides to jump on board.

Join Jann and his fellow drivers as they take their tremendous journey from gamer to actual driver, in what can only be described as the most ambitious and crazy thing to ever happen to racing… and it’s all true.

I had the rare opportunity to witness an early screening of “Gran Turismo” at my local theater. I had absolutely NO idea, nor did anyone in attendance, that we would be viewing “Gran Turismo” as it was part of the theater’s “Monday Movie Mystery.” When I saw the title appear on the screen, I was enormously excited and quietly exclaimed “Yes!” This is a film I had been absolutely dying to view. I had incredibly high expectations, based on the trailers and the concept in general (especially since I’m such an avid video gamer myself).

Without providing any spoilers, since this is an early review, “Gran Turismo” did not disappoint in the slightest. Director Neill Blomkamp took an amazing and distinctive approach to how this story is filmed. The various types of camerawork is impressive, sure, but what is truly jaw-dropping are the film’s visuals. There is one moment in particular where I exclaimed “Super cool.” It is during one of Jann’s races (and this doesn’t spoil anything, I promise). As Jann is driving and trying to visualize the track he played in the game and apply it to the REAL track, there is a short transition where Jann goes from being in the real race car to the time he was practicing at home, and we witness the blue outlines and the makeup of the race car disappear around Jann.

The pacing is spot-on perfect. There is a healthy balance between the intense sequences (such as competing against the other tournament players, the races) and the calmer moments of the film. I never felt as if I wasn’t receiving enough of either. The intense sequences, when they occur, are indeed nail-biting, edge of your seat moments, especially knowing that everything on screen actually occurred, but I smiled throughout (well, most of the time).

The performances by Archie Madekwe and David Harbour are incredible as Jann and Jack. They have terrific chemistry on screen. David Harbour is, in my opinion, an expert of his craft. He is able to carefully go from 100 to 50 with his character’s tone and demeanor, going from someone the audience isn’t fond of to someone you can’t help but be in awe of at the end. Archie gives an impressive performance as well and is no stranger to the screen (“Midsommar,” “See” and various films and projects with the BBC). Archie gives a very impassioned and in-depth look at Jann.

The one thing I WASN’T impressed with, as much as I love this film, is the language. There is a moderate amount of profanity, including one f-bomb that REALLY wasn’t necessary, that the film really didn’t need. However, there are no sexual scenes, no nudity, no drugs, and a couple of scenes of alcohol to contend with (brief scenes really). Speaking of content…

Content of Concern

Before you view the content of concern, please be aware that I was avidly and rapidly trying to type the content into my phone, as I had not intended to review this film until two weeks later, so I wasn’t able to catch everything.

Violence: There are two scenes where massive car wrecks occur during races (in both instances an individual is killed). The first wreck involves a race car crashing into the side wall and catching fire with the driver still inside. The second and third wreck include massive roll overs—one of which results in a spectator being crushed and killed by the car. We witness another car crashing against the barrier during a race. There is a scene where some teens are fleeing from the police, and there is some reckless driving as a result. Someone wonders if they have “blood on their hands.”

Vuglarity: F*ck (1), Sh*t (9), BS (1), Sh*tting (1), Pr*cks (1), B*llocks (1), A** (1) and the phrase “looking at porn”

Profanity: J*sus (1), G*d (2), OMG (1), Oh G*d (1), G*d- d*mn (2), D*mn (1), H*ly Sh*t (4)

Sex: Someone does a brief pelvic thrust during a dance. Two couples share a kiss

• Nudity: None

Alcohol: There are a couple brief moments where teens are seen drinking (though these teens are doing this in England, so it is legal) and there are a couple moments of drinking at the racing events and at a dinner.

Wokeism: None, this is simply a story about racing.

Other: We witness someone throw up. As mentioned earlier, there is a seen where teens are racing from the police.

Moral Issues

Toward the beginning of the film, Jann’s father is not ecstatic about Jann’s dream of becoming a professional race car driver. He believes Jann needs to do something more meaningful and useful with his life. Jann’s father does not believe in him.

Parenting is extremely difficult, but rewarding. Parents play such a critical role in a child’s development and even into adulthood. Parents are to love their children unconditionally, as Christ loves us, raise them up in the Lord, and support them in their dreams and aspirations. The Bible is very clear on the role of parents…

“Train up a child in the ways he should go and when he is old he shall not depart from it” — Proverbs 22:6

“Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” — Ephesians 6:4

“And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” — Deuteronomy 6:6-7

On the flip side of this, children are commanded to honor their father and mother (Exodus 20:2), not simply because it is one of the Ten Commandments , but because parents are due the honor and respect they have earned. Speaking of true followers of Christ, the Apostle Paul states…

“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” — Colossians 3:20

Closing Thoughts

There are far too few inspirational, relatively clean films to attend in this day and age (no film is perfectly clean, at least not from Hollywood). For all its faults (and the vulgar language and profanity is a large fault), “Gran Turismo” has some wonderful themes: courage, comradery, loving your enemy, carrying burdens, the roles of parents, etc. And, in general, I feel the positive themes outweigh the content issues.

“Gran Turismo” is a jaw-dropping, heart-stopping biographical, racing film with some stupendous performances and cinematography. In short, believe the hype surrounding “Gran Turismo.” However, I don’t recommend this film for children, especially due to the coarse language.

• Vulgar/Crude language: Moderately Heavy
• Profane language: Moderately Heavy
• Violence: Moderate
• Drugs/Alcohol: Mild
• Occult: None
• Wokeism: None

See list of Relevant Issues—questions-and-answers .

PLEASE share your observations and insights to be posted here.

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Gran turismo.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 21 Reviews
• Kids Say 18 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Intense crashes in exhilarating game-based racing flick.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Gran Turismo is director Neill Blomkamp's exciting, fact-based action drama about gamer-turned-professional race car driver Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe). While kids might use Jann's story to counter parental arguments against playing tons of video games, he's clearly a…

Why Age 11+?

Based on the popular video game franchise, the movie doubles as an ad for the ga

Several intense car crashes, including a first-person point of view from inside

Language includes "a--holes," "bitch," "bulls--t," "goddamn," "pr--ks," a use of

A crush. A kiss.

Reference to champagne being "for winners." Until that happens, characters drink

Any Positive Content?

Jann is a positive role model who's a great example of perseverance. He knows hi

Success requires conviction and commitment. A quote on a sign in the background

Main character Jann (British-born actor Archie Madekwe, who's of Nigerian and Sw

Products & Purchases

Based on the popular video game franchise , the movie doubles as an ad for the game, and the story acknowledges that the creation of the GT Academy was a marketing stunt. And, true to professional racing, brand names are seen everywhere, particularly those associated with cars (such as Michelin) and alcohol (Moet-Chandon in particular). Expensive sports cars like Porsche, Ferrari, and McLaren are treated with high esteem; Porsche gets so much positive attention that it's likely product placement. The most mentioned brand is Nissan, the car company sponsoring the GT Academy.

Violence & Scariness

Several intense car crashes, including a first-person point of view from inside the vehicle. Reference to the (real-life) death of a person who isn't introduced on-screen.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes "a--holes," "bitch," "bulls--t," "goddamn," "pr--ks," a use of "f--k," and the abbreviation "NFW." After Jann's first race, a person off camera can be heard congratulating him by saying "you broke your cherry." "Jesus Christ!" and "God!" are used as exclamations or to express disbelief.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Reference to champagne being "for winners." Until that happens, characters drink beer.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Jann is a positive role model who's a great example of perseverance. He knows his passion and sticks to his goals. Humble and polite, he puts in hard work, believes in himself, respects and listens to his coach, and knows himself well enough to know how he can remain calm and focused. Chief engineer Jeff Salton demonstrates integrity, even if doing the right thing means that he might not achieve his goal.

Positive Messages

Success requires conviction and commitment. A quote on a sign in the background sums it up: "The winner ain't the one with the fastest car, it's the one who refuses to lose." Teamwork is important.

Diverse Representations

Main character Jann (British-born actor Archie Madekwe, who's of Nigerian and Swiss descent) and his brother are biracial, and their loving, present father is played by Black actor Djimon Hounsou, who was born in Benin and grew up in France. Finalists at GT Academy come from all over the world and are diverse in terms of gender and race, including characters of South Asian, East Asian, and Latino descent. Gran Turismo video game creator Kazunori Yamucki is Japanese, as are the Nissan executives. Jann's hometown friend is Indian English. While most of the primary filmmakers are White men, three are of Asian descent.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that Gran Turismo is director Neill Blomkamp 's exciting, fact-based action drama about gamer-turned-professional race car driver Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe). While kids might use Jann's story to counter parental arguments against playing tons of video games, he's clearly a positive role model: He exemplifies perseverance, gratitude, and humility. Expect to see intense crashes on the race track, including some scenes shown from a first-person point of view. Brand names (especially cars and alcohol) are everywhere, and champagne is positioned as a drink for winners. Characters kiss and use strong language ("bulls--t," "goddamn," a use of "f--k it," etc.). There's a strong message about success requiring commitment, and watching the movie's events unfold might help kids believe that, with conviction, even their loftiest dream could come true. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (21)
• Kids say (18)

Based on 21 parent reviews

Gran Turismo high speed fun!

Overall good movie, what's the story.

Avid gamer Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) dreams of driving real race cars. His fantasy moves into reality when he takes first place in a Gran Turismo game tournament. Motorsport marketing executive Danny Moore ( Orlando Bloom ) designed the competition to find the best couch-surfing gamers from around the world and turn them into top-ranking professional race car drivers. Unfortunately, that's a feat that GT Academy racing coach ( David Harbour ) doubts is possible.

Is It Any Good?

A fist pump of aspiration, this fact-based biopic does laps around other sports movies -- at least, it will for teens who connect with the gaming aspect. Director Neill Blomkamp 's fans know that he's a master at elevating emotions, and in Gran Turismo, he delivers plenty -- including hope, disappointment, fluttery feelings of love, devastation, anticipation, trepidation, and the euphoria of unlikely success. What's more, leaning into the movie's gaming roots, he allows you to feel the experience as if it's happening to you.

Some of that experience -- just like watching a Formula One race in real life -- can occasionally drag (especially in the middle), but it's all a vital part of the process: The only way to get to the phenomenal, exciting ending is for the wheels to ride across every bit of road to get there. Jann encounters some serious real-life adversity that's likely to put the brakes on kids thinking of following his career path. (Parents may find themselves relating more to Jann's father, Steve, played by Djimon Hounsou , who's frustrated that his son spends all his time gaming and rides him to get a job.) But Jann's difficulties make the finish a knuckle-gnawer, fueled by a surge of adrenaline. You'll likely end the film feeling completely pumped, wondering what impossibility you can accomplish. Just wait to look up Jann's full story until a few days later, as some elements are fictionalized for the film.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Gran Turismo compares to other sports movies you've seen. How true do you think it is to what happened in real life? Why might filmmakers decide to change the facts in movies based on true stories?

How can video game skills be adapted for use in the real world? Are there any games that have led you to pursue the game's activity offline?

How does Jann demonstrate perseverance , humility , and gratitude ? How does Jack Salton demonstrate integrity ? Why are these important character strengths?

Could Jann have succeeded without Jack? Could Jack have coached another gamer to the same level of success? Describe what worked for these two and why teamwork is a vital life skill.

What's your "impossible" dream? What would it take to make it real?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 25, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : November 7, 2023
• Cast : Archie Madekwe , David Harbour , Orlando Bloom
• Director : Neill Blomkamp
• Inclusion Information : Black actors
• Studio : Columbia Pictures
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Cars and Trucks , Great Boy Role Models
• Character Strengths : Gratitude , Humility , Integrity , Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 135 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : intense action and some strong language
• Award : Common Sense Selection
• Last updated : August 18, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

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• Perseverance
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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Gran Turismo (Christian Movie Review) 

Verdict: Although not as groundbreaking as its source material, Gran Turismo merges compelling human drama with thrilling race sequences to deliver an exciting, inspirational sports drama.

About The Movie

It turns out that sometimes the key to achieving your dreams is simply to play countless hours of video games! (My younger self feels so vindicated.) Gran Turismo is based on the true story of Jann Mardenborough, a gamer turned professional racecar driver. It’s the type of remarkable real-life tale that’s ripe for a Hollywood treatment. Although not as groundbreaking as its source material, Gran Turismo merges compelling human drama with thrilling race sequences to deliver an uplifting sports drama.  

Despite the unconventional journey of its real-life protagonist, the film unfolds as a largely conventional sports drama. All the standard tropes are present (the jerky rich rival, the grumpy older mentor with a soft interior, the underdog everyone counts out, the pep talks, the last-second photo finishes). It’s all stuff you’ve likely seen before—and there’s nothing wrong with that. The sports movie formula is a much-used template because it works. We know the underdogs will miraculously win the state championship in the end, but that doesn’t make the journey less satisfying.    

Thus, while Gran Turismo may not break new ground, its narrative unfolds in a competent and compelling manner, achieving a satisfying blend of human drama, thrilling race sequences, and uplifting messages. The director, Neill Blomkamp, started his career with a bang but quickly fizzled out. I’m not sure if Gran Turismo will get him back onto the podium, but it certainly showcases his quality filmmaking ability.  

Video game aesthetics and mechanics are incorporated into the film in interesting ways, and the drama maintains momentum throughout its lengthy runtime. More importantly, as someone who finds actual car racing the peak of human boredom, Gran Turismo ’s racing scenes are thrilling. The exciting sequences utilize impressive camera work and sound design to immerse the audience into the action. In fact, people in my theater were cheering and applauding throughout the racing scenes as if transported into the stands of an actual race.  

Archie Madekwe is endearing in the lead role as Jann, but the standout performance is David Harbour as his jaded and grumpy mentor. The relationship dynamic between the two characters is the heart of the film, and the growing trust that develops between them feels believable and earned.  

Gran Turismo is not revolutionary, but it is a fun, well-executed, highly entertaining film that delivers the classic tropes people expect from a sports movie. It may not be among the best movies of the year, but it is one of the most enjoyable films I’ve seen so far. It will send audiences out of the theater feeling good (and perhaps also driving speedily to the store to purchase the latest video game console).

For Consideration

Language: One clear F-bomb and perhaps a muffled/interrupted one. A fair amount of other profanity (“s—“, “d—”). There are also frequent misuses of God and Jesus (“G— D—” and “J— C—”).  

Violence: Several car crashes leave characters bloodied and bruised. A spectator tragically dies off screen, and the characters struggle with the aftermath of that event.       

Sexuality: Jann slams his laptop closed when his brother barges into his room, leading his brother to assume he was watching porn (he is actually watching racing videos). A character refers to Jann’s first racing success as “popping his cherry.”

Other: Two characters suggest that they have “manifested” their present circumstances into existence.    

Engage The Film

Conviction and commitment  .

Jann’s unwavering dream of becoming a racer is continually questioned by those around him, including his own family. These characters stress the value of conviction, but seemingly lose faith when obstacles or challenges arise.  

Even within the pursuit of his dream, Jann is pushed to commit. On the racetrack, his mentor repeatedly hammers home that there’s no room for hesitation if he wants to succeed. If he is going to pass a car ahead of him, he must fully commit to the action or not bother getting behind the wheel at all.  

Religion is not addressed in the movie, but there are obvious parallels in this theme that Christians can affirm. The Bible urges believers to be hot or cold rather than lukewarm (Revelation 3:15). When it comes to Christian conviction, Jesus rebuked those who were halfheartedly going through the motions or who gave up at the first sign of resistance.   

Blurring of Fiction and Reality  

The central premise of Gran Turismo is that the virtual racing simulator had achieved such immersive realism that the line between fiction and reality became blurry. In the early stages of the film, Jann is criticized as an imposter, a racer who has never sat behind the wheel of a real racecar. “This is not a game. This is reality,” his cynical instructor says. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that not only has Jann’s experience in the virtual simulator prepared him for the “real thing,” but his many hours in the game have given him more familiarity with the car and the racetracks than his rivals have.  

In one sense, the frequent emphasis on the realism of the video game acts as a clear commercial for the product (this movie was produced by a video game company, after all). But the film touches on an important issue. As technology—in gaming and elsewhere—continues to advance, the divide between the virtual world and the real world is shrinking. What are the implications of a society in which our experiences in a digital world become indistinguishable from our experiences in the physical world? Gran Turismo presents an overwhelmingly positive perspective on this reality, although it is not hard to see the negative implications of this shrinking divide as well.  

Daniel holds a PhD in "Christianity and the Arts" from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author/co-author of multiple books and he speaks in churches and schools across the country on the topics of Christian worldview, apologetics, creative writing, and the Arts.

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GRAN TURISMO

"hard work, grit and disciplined focus achieve success".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Marketing man wants to change the rules in a contest because one young man is more articulate than his rival, but the racing team leader is adamant and the marketing man backs down, plus one driver, the protagonist’s main rival, cheats, but he ultimately fails.

More Detail:

GRAN TURISMO is a sports drama about a young man in Wales who’s one of the top players on the best, most elaborate car racing video game and becomes part of the Nissan car company’s racing team in Europe. Based on a true story, GRAN TURISMO is a superbly entertaining movie with terrific racing scenes (some of the best ever), but it fools around with the timeline of the young driver’s early racing career to increase the story’s tension, and its morally uplifting, pro-family, capitalist messages are marred by seven strong profanities and other foul language, so MOVIEGUIDE® advises extreme caution.

At 19, Jann Mardenborough is a college dropout living in Wales with his parents in 2011. He spends much of his time playing GRAN TURISMO, a Japanese racing game that’s the most realistic simulated racing game on the market. His father, Steve, is a former soccer star who wishes his son would occupy his time with more normal pursuits. However, Jann has become one of the top GRAN TURISMO players in the world.

Meanwhile, an English marketing expert working for Nissan, Danny Moore, convinces the Japanese board to hold a contest of the best GRAN TURISMO players where the top winner will become part of Nissan’s GT racing team. There’s one condition, however. Danny must get a top chief engineer and mechanic on board who can train the players to drive really well, without killing themselves. Danny asks many top people for the job, but he can only convince skeptical, irascible Jack Salter to head the GT Academy. Danny promises to give Jack final say in the way the contest is run and if anyone makes the cut.

Naturally, Jann is picked to compete. However, he’s not so good at first. In fact, at a crucial point, his car spins out of control. Jann tells Jack he felt a mechanical problem with the brakes. He impresses Jack when he turns out to be right.

From that point forward, Jann holds his own with the other students. However, he barely wins the final determining race by less than one second. So, the question becomes, Can Jann cut it on the European circuit without killing himself? The first hurdle he faces is getting his racing license by coming in fourth at a major race.

Meanwhile, Jann’s parents are afraid their son may seriously hurt himself, or worse.

GRAN TURISMO is remarkably entertaining. The racing scenes are terrific, some of the best ever put on film. David Harbour almost steals the show as Jack Salter. However, his strong chemistry with Archie Madekwe, the young man playing Jann, also helps keep viewers enthralled. As played by Archie, Jann is a guy you can cheer, no matter the challenges and trials he faces. That said, the movie changes the order of the car races in Jann’s story, to make the story more dramatic. For example, one perilous moment occurred two years AFTER the events depicted in the movie take place. Also, looking at Jann’s actual racing career, it looks like it didn’t really take that long for Jann to distinguish himself on the European Circuit. However, the events in the movie where Jann switches to racing Formula One cars seem fairly accurate.

GRAN TURISMO has a strong moral worldview with strong pro-capitalist elements. Jann works hard to excel and become the driver Team Nissan needs him to be. Also, the movie tells a strong story of father and son conflict that’s resolved in a powerful way by the time the movie ends. In addition, the bonds that grow between Jann and his mentor, Jack, are also heartwarming. Finally, Jann achieves success through hard work, merit, raw nerve, grit, perseverance, and disciplined focus. He doesn’t cheat, even though his main rival does.

GRAN TURISMO is a fairly wholesome movie in general. However, it does have about 30 obscenities and profanities, including one “f” word and several strong profanities. It also has some intense racing scenes and scary crashes. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises extreme caution.

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Catholic Review

Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Movie Review: ‘Gran Turismo’

NEW YORK (OSV News) – In the early 1990s, video game designer Kazunori Yamauchi, along with several colleagues, set out to develop a car racing simulation that would be realistic down to the smallest detail. How well they succeeded may be judged by fact-based drama that takes its name from the title of the franchise they created, “Gran Turismo” (Sony).

Director Neill Blomkamp’s lively against-the-odds tale recounts the unlikely career of working-class Welsh lad Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe). Having mastered Yamauchi’s game, Jann is offered the opportunity to prove his skills in real life via a competition among his GT-playing peers, the winner of which will get to join Nismo, Nissan’s motorsports team.

Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), the marketing executive who conceived the contest as a publicity ploy, initially offers Jann his support. But the youth struggles to gain the confidence of Jack Salter (David Harbour), the hard-bitten coach hired to train the entrants.

Jann also faces opposition from his dad, Steve (Djimon Hounsou). An ex-soccer player, Steve considers Jann’s many hours spent at the console as so much wasted time.

Teen viewers might potentially have benefited both from the example of Jann’s persistence and from the arc of his relationship with Steve. But, while “Gran Turismo” is free of problematic violence or sexual content, as scripted by Jason Hall and Zach Baylin, it comes freighted with an amount of vulgar dialogue that makes it doubtful material for any but grown-ups.

Mature moviegoers will appreciate the picture’s positive values as it highlights the need for family solidarity, reconciliation and the open acknowledgement of mistakes. There are some touching emotional moments along the plot’s familiar course as well, and Madekwe succeeds in winning empathy for his character.

Still, lengthy sequences demonstrating Jann’s resourcefulness and resilience behind the wheel, while suspenseful, may ultimately try the patience of all but enthusiasts. Fewer laps before the checkered flag would have kept this engaging biopic in sharper focus.

The film contains graphic auto accidents, about a half-dozen instances each of profanity and milder swearing, at least one rough term, numerous crude expressions and occasional crass talk. The OSV News classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 – parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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High Octane Thrills Meets Hollywood

Thanks for stopping by! You want to know more about Gran Turismo and if you should take your child. In this Gran Turismo Christian Movie Review, I give you the information you need before viewing this movie with your children. 

This exciting underdog story features a video gamer and his rise to becoming a professional race car driver. But it is an intense movie, and may be too intense for the younger crowd.

I applaud you for being proactive (and if your child has already seen the movie and you are trying to figure out how to deal with that, I have some teachable moment topics below).

Gran Turismo Christian Review

Studio synopsis:.

Gran Turismo is based on the unbelievable true story of a team of unlikely underdogs – a struggling working-class gamer (Archie Madekwe), a failed former race car driver (David Harbour), and an idealistic motorsport executive (Orlando Bloom). Together, they risk it all to take on the most elite sport in the world. Gran Turismo is an inspiring, thrilling, and action-packed story that proves that nothing is impossible when you’re fueled from within.

My Synopsis:

Did you grow up and follow your dreams ? Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) sells “bloomers” in a boutique but dreams of being a race car driver with real cars and not just the ones on a video game screen. Both his mother and father want him to do something besides play video games.

When Nissan teams up with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (PlayStation) to offer the chance for the top ten gamers to compete for the chance to win a spot as an actual race car driver, Jann faces impossible odds. Does a video gamer actually have what it takes to compete against the top race car drivers in the world?

Gran Turismo Christian Movie Review What Parents Want to Know

Language: .

Strong language was one reason this movie received a PG-13 rating. There is one use of the f word, and an instance where it may have been said or mumbled. 

Additionally, there are several instances where God’s and Jesus’s names are taken in vain. Repeated use of holy s-it, s-it, and bull-, along with d-mn, b-tch, and h-ll.

There is a horrible and horrific accident. A person is killed. However, you do not see that happen, but it is talked about. You also see a person being removed from a vehicle and put onto a helicopter. 

Additionally, there are other crashes with cars on fire or flipping over and spinning out.

Furthermore, there are scenes where a race car driver intentionally crashes into another driver. 

A character is shown with scars on his face after an accident.

In one scene, a person points their finger like a gun at another person’s head.

Spiritual Content:

It is said, “You manifested this”.

Other Content:

A comment is made, you “broke your cherry.” (I am glad that I didn’t get asked about that, but I don’t think we are out of the woods yet.) Another character assumes a person is viewing porn on a computer when he hastily closes the screen.

Additionally, a person vomits.

There is a brief suggestive dance. Furthermore, there are a few scenes that involve alcohol. One of those scenes involve underage drinking. Champagne is drunk right from the bottle. A couple kisses.

One character scrolls through a girl’s social media posts. It is apparent he likes her.

Two characters sneak out of the house, take a car that isn’t theirs, and meet up with friends. 

Excessive Commercialism:

While Gran Turismo is a Sony PlayStation game and Nissan sponsored the GT Academy, there are 2 hours of product placement throughout the film. Gran Turismo, the movie, is based on the famous PlayStation video game.

Gran Turismo Christian Movie Review Viewing Recommendations:

I laughed, cried, and sat on the edge of my seat. Most importantly, after the movie was over, I was Googling the true story of Jann Mardenborough before I even got to my car. When the audience wants to know more about the movie they just watched, that is the definition of a great movie, and even non-fans of car racing will enjoy this movie.

Furthermore, this feel-good underdog drama with video game origins crafts a story that touches the heart. The special effects shots and the race sequences are fantastic.

However, just because a movie captures my attention doesn’t mean it is suitable for kids. Based on the content of the movie, including an accident, and the harsh language, this movie is not for kids. Additionally, there are intense racing sequences with crashes and fires. Be aware that even older children who have been in accidents may have a problem watching those type of scenes.

About the Gran Turismo Movie:

Rating: PG-13 Intense Action and Some Strong Language

Theatrical Release Date: August 25, 2023

Runtime: 2 hours, 15 minutes

Genre: Action/Sports

Studio: Columbia Pictures, PlayStation Productions, 2.0 Entertainment

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Screenplay by: Jason Hall (American Sniper) and Zach Baylin (King Richard)

Produced by: Doug Belgrad, Assad Qizilbash, Carter Swan, Dana Brunetti

Executive Producers: Matthew Herschel, Jason Hall, Kazunori Yamauchi, Herman Hulst

Edited by: Colby Parker Jr. And Austyn Daines

Music by: Lorne Balfe and Andrew Kawczynski 

Distributed by: Sony Pictures Releasing

Based on The PlayStation Studios video game

The Cast of Gran Turismo:

Danny Moore played by Orlando Bloom

Jack Salter played by David Harbour

Jann Mardenborough played by Archie Madekwe

Kazunori Yamauchi played by Akihito Hira

Matty Davis played by Darren Barnet

Lesley Mardenborough played by Geri Horner

Steve Mardenborough played by Djimon Hounsou

Nicholas Capa played by Josha Stradowski

Coby Mardenborough played by Daniel Puig

Audrey played by Maeve Courtier-Lilley

Antonio Cruz played by Pepe Barroso

Frederik Schulin played by Niall McShea

Persol played by Nikhil Parmar

Patrice Capa played by Thomas Kretschmann

Akira Akiba played by Akie Kotabe

Nissan Board Member played by Sadao Ueda

Senior Nissan Executive played by Wai Wong

Teachable Moments from Gran Turismo:

This video game movie tells the real-life story of how Jann Mardenborough became a real-life professional driver. However, nine players didn’t make that top spot. Discuss the odds of the competition. There were actually 90,000 competing along with Jann in the first rounds.

Furthermore, discuss the aspects of the movie that deal with disobedience, underage drinking, lying, taking the car without permission, and evading the police. What does the Bible say about each of those actions?

Ask the question: “Why do you think Jann lied to his father about who was driving the car?” 

Frequently Asked Questions about Gran Turismo:

Where can i watch gran turismo.

Gran Turismo’s release date is August 25, 2023.

Is there an end-credit scene for Gran Turismo?

There is not an end-credit scene for Gran Turismo.

Is Gran Turismo based on a true story?

Gran Turismo is based on a loose telling of the fact-based story of the Gran Turismo games and one winner of the GT Academy. However, they have taken liberties with the real story and embellished or changed the timeline in some instances.

For instance, in real life, the crash that killed someone happened after the 24 Hours of Le Mans race.

Will Gran Turismo stream on Disney+? 

No, Gran Turismo will not be streaming on Disney+.

Will Gran Turismo stream on Peacock?

Gran Turismo will not be streaming on Peacock as Sony struck a deal with Netflix to stream their movies.

Will Gran Turismo stream on Netflix?

Since Sony struck a deal with Netflix, Gran Turismo will stream on Netflix. We expect Gran Turismo to stream around November 2023.

How much did it cost to produce Gran Turismo?

Gran Turismo cost $40 million to produce.

How many people competed in the Gran Turismo video game competition?

Ninety thousand people were competing in a series of Nissan competitions throughout different regions. They took the top participants to GT Academy, where they vied for the top spot.

What year did Jann Mardenborough win the GT Academy?

Mardenborough, the main character, became the third winner of the GT Academy in 2011. Additionally, he was the youngest competition winner and drove with Team Nissan at the Dubai 24 Hour. 

Is Jack Salter based on a real person?

Danny Harbour (Stranger Things star) plays Jack Salter who is not a real person. However, he is based on the real life race car driver, Johnny Herbert.

Is Nissan Executive Danny Moore based on a real person?

Danny Moore is played by Orlando Bloom (Lord of the Rings star). However, you will not find a person named Danny Moore involved with GT Academy. Moore is based on GT Academy Founder Darren Cox. Cox was a Nissan Europe Executive. GT Academy was the brainchild of Cox.

Fun Facts About Gran Turismo:

The real-life Jann Mardenborough performed stunts for his character in the movie.

Executive Producer, Kazunori Yamauchi, is the video game developer of the racing simulator, Gran Turismo. He is also CEO of Polyphony Digital. His favorite car design is the Ford GT and he owns two of them.

Have you seen the Cars movie franchise? Those adorable racing movies are a much better choice for children’s viewing.

Reviewing movies for parents from a Christian perspective since 2005. Know Before You Go!

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• DVD & Streaming

Gran Turismo

• Action/Adventure , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

• August 25, 2023
• Archie Madekwe as Jann Mardenborough; Orlando Bloom as Danny Moore; David Harbour as Jack Salter; Djimon Hounsou as Steve Mardenborough; Geri Horner as Lesley Mardenborough; Josha Stradowski as Nicholas Capa; Daniel Puig as Coby Mardenborough; Maeve Courtier-Lilley as Audrey

Home Release Date

• September 26, 2023
• Neill Blomkamp

Distributor

• Columbia Pictures

Movie Review

Jann Mardenborough hasn’t been able to get it in gear since he graduated from high school. He tried college for a little bit, but it didn’t work. So, at this point he’s stuck in a dead-end job selling socks and underwear at a local department store in Wales.

The 20-year-old’s parents are pushing him to go back to college, to have some kind of plan for his future. Maybe follow a dream. But frankly, the only dream he’s really interested in has to do with cars.

And I’m not talking your average run-to-the-supermarket kind of people-mover. No, Jann is enamored with the kind of majestic machines that he drives in PS3’s über-popular Gran Turismo racing game. He can build ‘em. He can fine tune ‘em. And he can race ‘em better than anyone.

Of course, in the non-digital world, pro racing is a pretty exclusive club. Its members breathe rarefied- and very expensive air. And Jann’s middle-class father is quick to remind his son that a dream needs to be at least somewhere close to the realm of reality. Otherwise, it’s like spitting into the wind. No matter how good you may be at some silly game.

What Jann doesn’t know, however, is that a marketing guy named Danny Moore is also reaching for a dream at that moment in time. He’s pushing a wild idea to the big wigs at Nissan Motor Corp.

Danny knows for a fact that Gran Turismo —an incredibly accurate driving sim created by Kazunori Yamauchi—has inspired 80 million gamers to love cars in its 20+ year history up to that point. So why not connect all that passion and all those car lovers to Nissan, he asks? Why not put together a GT Academy for great Gran Turismo players and find the best of the best? Then put that guy or gal on Nissan’s real-world pro circuit.

In Danny’s estimation, that would make for a marketing dream.

Of course, as you may have heard, a dream needs to be somewhere in the realm of reality. And everybody tells Danny that his dream is crazy. Nobody thinks it’s possible. Drivers in that pro class are rare. They’re elite athletes.

Gamers, on the other hand, are guys and gals sitting in a dark room with too many chip and cookie crumbs on their shirt fronts. The whole cockamamie concept is nothing but nonsense.

However, the Nissan execs … give the project a green light.

And just like that, Danny Moore and Jann Mardenborough both get a shot at accomplishing something quite impossible.

Positive Elements

Early on, Jann and his dad, Steve, are somewhat at odds. Steve thinks Jann’s video game obsession is a worthless waste of time. But even more than that, he’s earnestly concerned for his son’s future. Steve knows how his own lack of planning as a young man hurt some aspects of his life. And he desperately wants to spare Jann that same pain.

That causes a real rift between the two, and Jann lashes verbally at his dad. “I’m doing this whether you believe in me or not,” he proclaims.

Ultimately though, Steve recognizes Jann’s passion and hard work, and he does all he can to support his son. Jann’s mom follows suit. And the couple invests hard earned money to fly to Jann’s side in support. Jann and his dad tearfully embrace and voice their love for one another.

Jack Slater, a former pro racer who steps into the role of engineer for the gamer drivers project, is another adult who speaks positively into Jann’s life. Initially he doesn’t think it’s remotely possible that a gamer of any stripe can actually become a real racer. But as he works with Jann, he becomes a great source of encouragement and seasoned insight. He becomes a mentor for the young driver.

Spiritual Elements

Sexual content.

Jann has a crush on a local twenty-something, Audrey, who lives in his neighborhood. And the two have a very nice friendship, though they seem to be two ships passing in the night. With time, though, Jann realizes that he’d like them to be something more and Audrey declares that she wants that, too. The two get together in Tokyo. They date, go to a dance club and kiss. And they kiss later after a race as well.

Jann is on his laptop watching a racing video when his younger brother walks in and asks, “Is that porn?”

When Jann finally drives well enough to earn his pro license, his pit crew chief makes a sexual quip about Jann attaining maturity in a real race.

Violent Content

Early on, Jack Slater voices his disapproval at the idea of strapping a gamer to a “200 mile-per-hour rocket” of a car. And we see cases where he is proven quite right. There are a number of crashes that damage or demolish cars and send young wannabes home.

There are a several crashes involving pro racers as well. We learn that it was a crash and a fellow racer’s death that ended Jack’s own pro racing career.

One of the most devastating crashes onscreen involves a driver who smashes into a wall and barely crawls out of the intensely burning wreck that’s caused.

The second-worst accident involves Jann. His car is swept up into the air and tumbles end over end into the surrounding barriers and nearby spectators. We’re told that one spectator died as a result. And we see the emotional agony Jann goes through, bruised and bloodied in a hospital bed, because of his part in that death.

Jack points out that the crash was not Jann’s fault. But it could impact Jann’s ability to move forward, he says, much like many devastating moments in life. “The crash won’t define you, but how you respond to it will.”

In several instances, Nick Capa, a privileged pro whom Jack Slater used to work for, makes foolish and potentially deadly choices to demonstrate his superiority to Jann. He thumps Jack’s car with his own vehicle. In one case, it sends Jann skidding off the course. In another, Capa wrecks his own vehicle in the process.

Crude or Profane Language

Language is the biggest red flag for young viewers here (especially all those kids who would love to go see a game-related movie about fast cars). There are 10 s-words, two (or perhaps three) f-words, and several uses each uses of the words “b–ch,” “d–n” and “a–hole.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused six times (two of those blending God with “d–n”). Somebody calls a group of drivers “pr-cks.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

A group of teens and twenty-somethings drink beer at a street party. Several of them become very drunk. Jann, who’s sober, drives two of them (one of whom is his brother) home.

Several adults drink beer on a jet and in a restaurant. Jann is in the group. Later he and others drink champagne and spray bottles of the stuff over a crowd of people.

Other Negative Elements

Jann’s brother and friend, decide to pass beers between two moving cars—despite Jann’s warnings not to. The shenanigans almost cause an accident, and police then pull the two cars over. But Jann decides to run from police and out-maneuvers them. (Which the movie winks at and praises him for with a video game-like award of “Cop Avoidance.”)

A number of racers and pit crew members are smug and make it very clear (verbally and physically) that Jann is not wanted on the race circuit.

During their strength and endurance practice, some of the gamer drivers bend over in pain. One vomits.

As a racing movie with a video game heart, Gran Turismo picks its lane and hits its line very well.

The film is based, remarkably, on a true story that took place in 2011. It’s fun, tightly paced and gives viewers a real sense of the speed of a race and the incredible effort needed to be a real-world pro racer. I also enjoyed how director Blomkamp sweetened the visual pot with CGI special effects and graphics designed to appeal to the gamers in the crowd.

However, viewers revving their engines for a family outing need to keep in mind that there are a few things here that could be worthy of a yellow flag. As you might expect, there are fiery car wrecks and vehicles hurtling into spectators and scenery. But you might not expect the fiery language that hits viewers at speed, ready to scorch young ears in the family pit crew.

Too bad the PG-13 rated movie’s makers didn’t take a cue from the E-rated game’s creators on that front.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Gran Turismo Is Luxuriously Familiar

Behold: a video-game adaptation, a coming-of-age tale, and an inspirational sports biopic, in one sleek package.

This year’s zippy The Super Mario Bros. Movie aside, video games have historically yielded less-than-satisfactory film adaptations. For the most part, they range from forgettable ( Assassin’s Creed ) to regrettable ( Uncharted ), the storytelling never quite capturing the thrill of actually interacting with a game.

Perhaps that’s why Gran Turismo —a new film based on a PlayStation racing franchise that began in 1997—seems so eager to define itself as anything but a game adaptation. Featuring dialogue that repeatedly reminds the audience that its source material is a “racing simulator,” the film positions the game as merely a narrative framework for a more intimate story. The movie is not about the game per se, but is instead based on the story of a real-life gamer: Jann Mardenborough, a teenager who became a professional driver after years of honing his skills on his PlayStation. The result is a mishmash of subgenres that, surprisingly, works.

Sure, the film is still a brand-extension exercise: There are close-ups of fancy logos (Porsche! Moët & Chandon! TAG Heuer!) as well as Orlando Bloom playing a Nissan executive who launches the program that recruits gamers to drive real cars. But its overall presentation is humbler than one might expect. The film does not appear to be setting up sequels through cliffhangers, or spin-offs through its characters. It doesn’t transform races into over-the-top, gravity-defying set pieces—the sight of vehicles kept literally on the ground might feel refreshing to anyone who’s watched Fast X .

Instead, Gran Turismo adds an intriguing twist to the classic underdog sports tale. Jann (played by Archie Madekwe) is a racer whose strongest asset in a life-threatening sport is his understanding of a video game. The film illustrates this using a neat effect: When on a real track, he envisions the path before him as a digital outline. When traveling at actual high-octane speeds, he imagines sitting in front of his console, helmetless and ensconced in his bedroom. Sports dramas usually feature a hero passionately transforming themselves, physically and emotionally, into a contender. In Jann’s case, training also means learning to see his sport as more than a series of predictable inputs.

Read: The never-ending quest to make a great video-game movie

Helping him is a former professional racer and grizzled father figure named Jack Salter ( Stranger Things ’ David Harbour), a character invented for the film. Jack lends gravity to an otherwise mostly conventional mentor-mentee relationship; he is haunted by how thin the line between confidence and cockiness can be in the sport. Through his bond with Jann, the film lightly interrogates why anyone would want to strap themselves into an automobile hurtling down a closed loop at breakneck speed.

But not for too long, because, oh, those cars! The real stars of Gran Turismo are the vehicles—sleek steel marvels captured lovingly by the director, Neill Blomkamp, who seems to prefer filming machines to flesh-and-blood characters. He indulges in seat-rattling sound, sweeping drone shots, and immersive camerawork to place the viewer on the asphalt alongside Jann. The point of these kinetic, stylish sequences is not just to sell the cars; they convey the excitement and danger inherent to motorsports. The images of drivers rushing into frame, vehicles sliding within inches of one another, are genuinely scary. And a scene of Jann crashing off course and accidentally killing a spectator—a real-life incident that occurred in 2015—is particularly visceral to watch.

The cars are, in fact, more memorable than most of the characters—but that’s okay. Gran Turismo is satisfyingly simple, its ensemble an embodiment of well-worn tropes: the underdog, the jaded coach, the parents who struggle to accept their wunderkind son’s dreams. There are perhaps too many subplots—Jann has a love interest as well as a series of interchangeable rivals, most of whom become allies kind of out of nowhere—but the film is essentially cinematic comfort food. Every clichéd motivational line of dialogue and thinly drawn supporting character reassures the viewer that Jann, despite hazards and tragedy, is headed for success. That’s not a spoiler: Gran Turismo telegraphs its feel-good finish from the starting line.

In that sense, the film reminded me not just of video-game adaptations, sports biopics, and racing thrillers, but of coming-of-age movies— The Karate Kid rather than Le Mans . As I watched Gran Turismo , I was also surprised that I hadn’t seen something like it in some time: a summer crowd-pleaser that uses a splashy backdrop to tell a familiar but enjoyably emotional story. In an ever-expanding field of blockbusters trying to outdo one another in stunts, stakes, and silliness, a movie that hums along so inoffensively can feel like a luxury.

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Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors, gran turismo.

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Certain films are so close to being good, so close to achieving a rare level of brilliance, your anger springs from said work not reaching those heights. Director Neill Blomkamp ’s “Gran Turismo,” a crowd-pleasing, genre-bending sports drama, approaches wonder with an odd tepidness; it maneuvers around any modicum of character development by taking all-too simple routes and swerves away from formal experimentation, opting instead for simple enjoyment.  

And yet, I can’t say I wasn’t invested in every race, lap, and turn. Nor can I say the climax didn’t successfully tug my heart toward an emotional response as the intrepid Jann Mardenborough ( Archie Madekwe ), a teenager who rose from gamer to real-life car racer, passed the finish line. 

“Gran Turismo” is an uncommon yet familiar biopic, a video game-inspired narrative with unique strengths and recurrent weaknesses. For one, as Mardenborough likes to say, the property the film takes inspiration from isn’t a game; it’s a simulator. Players can customize vehicles to startling specific details through a seemingly infinite library of parts to imitate a range of makes and models that rival professional drivers (Blomkamp attempts to visualize such realism by having transparent VFX cars envelop Mardenborough whenever he plays). 

Marketing extraordinaire Danny Moore ( Orlando Bloom ) knows the potentiality of such skill: He goes to GT proposing a competition in which the top seven gamers will train to become an actual racer for the Nissan team. He also recruits seasoned veteran crew chief and former driver Jack Salter ( David Harbour ) as a trainer. Moore’s venture brings heavy risk. And yet, when Jack asks Moore what the marketer gets out of this, Moore doesn’t have an answer. Despite Bloom’s inspired take, the wobbly, incomprehensible motivations of Moore only offer frustration.

Mardenborough’s desires are clearer cut: He wants to work on real cars. His father, Steve ( Djimon Hounsou ), a former professional footballer presently relegated to menial jobs, wants his son to be practical, lest he end up like his old man, filled with broken dreams. We don’t get much screen time or interiority from any Mardenborough family member. He has a doting, understanding mother ( Geri Halliwell ) and a partying immature brother ( Daniel Puig ), but they only fulfill the basic duty of filling out morsels of screen time. At a party, Mardenborough meets Audrey ( Maeve Courtier-Lilley ), whom he’ll keep up vicariously via Instagram. It’s disappointing that she never evolves narratively beyond being the dream girl on Mardenborough’s screen.

The young gamers turned drivers in the GT Academy are similarly thinly sketched. They’re inchoate obstacles who, once again, merely round out the biopic’s run time. The Academy's more pressing narrative function is to serve as a site for Mardenborough and Jack’s budding rapport. The latter is skeptical that these keyboard warriors possess the physical and competitive acumen to become professionals. Jason Hall and Zach Baylin ’s script plays an exhausting game of keep-away about Jack’s tragic backstory (are we supposed to believe that Mardenborough, a perpetually online teenager, didn’t Google his trainer?). 

“Gran Turismo” doesn’t really kick into gear until Mardenborough moves past the Academy to real racing, where he competes against teams hostile to simulator racers. It’s difficult not to hear characters say that sim drivers will never replace real drivers without thinking about the real-life struggle SAG-AFTRA and WGA face against AI, even if Mardenborough is a real person. Blomkamp portrays people like Mardenborough as plucky outsiders, not unlike the bobsledders in “ Cool Runnings .” The film’s use of common sports movie tropes unexpectedly aligning with real-world concerns makes for uneasy tension. 

Those tropes keep the viewer engaged even when the on-screen storytelling doesn’t wholly deserve it. While you’d expect editors Colby Parker, Jr. and Austyn Daines , along with cinematographer Jacques Jouffret , to match real gameplay rhythms and virtual visuals, the freeze frames that tell viewers what lap we’re on crush the pace, and the information provided is often repetitive to the dialogue. 

Even so, tropes are tropes because they work. For Mardenborough and Jack, it’s us against the world. A rivalry between Mardenborough and an ultra-rich racing team adds a dash of tension; a tragic crash gives Mardenborough a comeback story; a harrowing speech by the ever-dependable Hounsou puts the finishing touches on this underdog story and fully invests the viewer in the cares of an unassuming teenager. While "Gran Turismo" has greater issues than what’s outlined here, some nitpicky, others larger in scope—Madekwe as a lead is low-key to the point of invisibility—Blomkamp furnishes just enough cautionary thrills.  

In theaters Friday, August 25th. 

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Gran Turismo (2023)

Rated PG-13 for intense action and some strong language.

135 minutes

Archie Madekwe as Jann Mardenborough

David Harbour as Jack Salter

Orlando Bloom as Danny Moore

Darren Barnet as Matty Davis

Geri Halliwell as Lesley Mardenborough

Djimon Hounsou as Steve Mardenborough

Josha Stradowski as Nicholas Capa

Daniel Puig

Thomas Kretschmann

Maeve Courtier-Lilley

Emelia Hartford

• Neill Blomkamp

Writer (story by)

• Zach Baylin

Cinematographer

• Jacques Jouffret
• Colby Parker Jr.
• Lorne Balfe
• Andrew Kawczynski

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Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story

Where to watch.

Watch Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story with a subscription on Netflix, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Gran Turismo 's brisk action and feel-good underdog drama are undermined by its loose telling of the fact-based story, but this is still a generally solid racing movie.

If you're a racing fan or you've had fun playing the Gran Turismo games, then this entertaining underdog story is a must-watch movie.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Neill Blomkamp

David Harbour

Jack Salter

Orlando Bloom

Danny Moore

Archie Madekwe

Jann Mardenborough

Darren Barnet

Matty Davis

Geri Halliwell

Lesley Mardenborough

Movie Clips

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Gran Turismo Movie Review

Not so bad, for a very long playstation commercial.

Gran Turismo plays in select theaters beginning August 11, before opening wide August 25.

Gran Turismo is a slick, watchable hunk of cross-promotional pablum – a glorified infomercial with bona fide crowd-pleasing horsepower under the hood. What the movie is marketing is its own source material, the wildly popular series of racing video games that make up one of PlayStation's biggest franchises. On the off chance that anyone in the audience isn't already a fan, the film makes like the pushiest associate on the dealership floor, rattling off key features and waxing poetic about the genius of Polyphony honcho Kazunori Yamauchi (played onscreen by Takehiro Hira – though the actual Yamauchi turns up in a cameo as a sushi chef ). Thankfully, the roar of engines eventually drowns out the sales pitch, though there's still room for some product placement between bursts of stirring sports-movie cliché.

This might be the first video game adaptation that's also based on a true story – namely, that of Jann Mardenborough, a British teenager who got the opportunity, in 2011, to convert his adolescence behind the virtual steering wheel (sold separately, and lovingly showcased in the movie) into a career of turning left at dangerously high IRL speeds. Gran Turismo plays fast and loose with the details of his unlikely Cinderella story, conforming it to a familiar beat-the-odds trajectory. Naturally, the first person young Jann (Archie Madekwe) has to prove wrong is his father (Djimon Hounsou), who has the nerve to gently suggest that being good at a driving game doesn't qualify him to drive real race cars.

Of course, Gran Turismo isn't just any old driving game. It's an advanced driving simulator, someone explicitly clarifies – one of several lines of dialogue that feels like a note from Sony Interactive Entertainment. "I played the game, and it's remarkable," goes another, courtesy of ambitious Nissan executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), who's loosely modeled on GT Academy founder Darren Cox. Danny promises the suits that recruiting players into the professional racing circuit will help attract an untapped market of potential car buyers… which is probably some version of the line that got the movie made, too. Bloom plays these scenes like he's starring in his own Air -like corporate biopic on the margins of the plot.

Winning the qualifying multiplayer match, Jann drifts into an extended basic-training montage that's like Top Gun in miniature, complete with an inexplicably hostile, Iceman-like academy rival (Darren Barnet). He also falls under the skeptical, tough-love tutelage of a veteran race car driver played by David Harbour, continuing his mission to improve every middling Hollywood franchise play to which he becomes attached. Harbour sells all the hackneyed, expected mentor business: the aging-legend saltiness, the pit-stop pep talks, the eventual transformation into a true believer. If the movie occasionally grazes the genuine soul of something like Rocky, he's a big reason why.

What's the best video game movie or TV show of 2023 so far?

An opening showroom documentary on the legacy of Gran Turismo, which feels like something smuggled out of a stockholders meeting, bears the mark of director Neill Blomkamp (of District 9 fame and Chappie infamy). More than a decade after his plans for a big-screen Halo fell apart, Blomkamp has finally fulfilled his destiny to make a video game movie. It's the right lane for him; absent any overreaching aspirations to allegory, Gran Turismo benefits from his 21st-century need for speed, which cuts the rise-to-fame boilerplate into a propulsive flurry.

At first, you wonder if the filmmaker has the chops for the gig. An early joy-ride getaway from the cops is hard to follow, and Blomkamp makes the rather boneheaded unforced error of montaging straight through Jann's first time in the driver's seat, which should have the awe of a religious experience, not the skippable anticlimax of a cutscene. But the director acquits himself well during the actual race sequences, which steadily escalate into pageants of deafening sound and breathtaking velocity. Blomkamp jumps all over the racetrack, swooping overhead via dramatic drone shots, pulling in tight on the tense faces of the drivers, fetishizing the ins and outs of the automobile. He stylistically freeze-frames position changes, merging authentic race logistics with the visual language of the games. And he gives a late freak accident a scary majesty (though where the crash arrives in the timeline of events, right before the final act, is yet another way that the movie fudges facts).

Gran Turismo Stills

Gran Turismo has the hum of a modern blockbuster machine, but its storytelling mechanics are decidedly old-school. It's a rags-to-riches fairy tale simulator. Jann, the quintessential underdog, has to overcome not just his own doubts but also those of snooty European race royalty (they dub him "the gamer") and even his own naysaying pit crew. It's him versus the whole money-buys-ranking pro-racing establishment, though it's pretty rich positioning multinational behemoths Sony and Nissan as the scrappy little guys. The movie eventually goes full Ford PvP Ferrari with a climactic bid for respect at the world's most notoriously challenging race, 24 Hours of Le Mans.

What we're watching, ultimately, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, albeit one drawn from the real-life leaderboards. Jann, whose hours upon hours of digital experience gives him a new outlook on racing (he can see lines to pass his professional competitors don't), is himself a walking, pedal-pressing commercial for the benefits of logging time with a controller. Not since "video games help with your hand-eye coordination" has the target demo been gifted a more convincing case for the tangible benefits of their pastime. Play enough games, Gran Turismo says, and maybe you too could have a future in motorsport! So long as those games, of course, boast the stunning graphics, amazingly realistic car mechanics, and endless customization options of Gran Turismo 7, now available for the low, low price of $49.69.

District 9 director Neill Blomkamp brings an appealing speed and cornball enthusiasm to his first video game adaptation, based on both the popular PlayStation racing series and the true story of a fan who traded the virtual steering wheel for a real one. The film is pure sports-movie hokum, done with just enough conviction (much of it courtesy of David Harbour, who's typically excellent in the stock role of a racing veteran-turned-mentor) to help you ignore how relentlessly Gran Turismo advertises the games themselves.

In This Article

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Gran Turismo

Based on the unbelievable, inspiring true story of a team of underdogs - a struggling, working-class gamer, a failed former race car driver, and an idealistic motorsport exec - who risk it a... Read all Based on the unbelievable, inspiring true story of a team of underdogs - a struggling, working-class gamer, a failed former race car driver, and an idealistic motorsport exec - who risk it all to take on the most elite sport in the world. Based on the unbelievable, inspiring true story of a team of underdogs - a struggling, working-class gamer, a failed former race car driver, and an idealistic motorsport exec - who risk it all to take on the most elite sport in the world.

• Neill Blomkamp
• Zach Baylin
• David Harbour
• Orlando Bloom
• Archie Madekwe
• 482 User reviews
• 185 Critic reviews
• 48 Metascore
• 3 nominations

Top cast 73

• Jack Salter

• Danny Moore

• Jann Mardenborough

• Kazunori Yamauchi

• Matty Davis

• Lesley Mardenborough
• (as Geri Halliwell Horner)

• Steve Mardenborough

• Nicholas Capa

• Coby Mardenborough

• Antonio Cruz

• Frederik Schulin

• Patrice Capa

• Akira Akiba

• Skeptical Nissan Board Member

• Senior Nissan Executive

• Jack Man Jones
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Jann Mardenborough plays a stunt double in the film for the actor who portrays himself.
• Goofs The emergency vehicle's sound at Nürburgring, Germany is of a US/UK vehicle.

[from trailer]

Jack Salter : If you miss a line in the game, you reset. You miss it on the track, you could die.

• Connections Featured in Sunrise: Episode dated 10 August 2023 (2023)
• Soundtracks Hold My Head Written by Kenny Beats (as Kenneth Blume III), Larry Brooks, and Warren Brooks Performed by Kenny Beats Courtesy of XL Recordings Contains a sample of "Now I Can Hold My Head Up High" Performed by The Triads Courtesy of The Numero Group

User reviews 482

• Sleepin_Dragon
• Aug 8, 2023
• How long is Gran Turismo? Powered by Alexa
• August 25, 2023 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Gran Turismo
• Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story
• Dubai, United Arab Emirates (location)
• Columbia Pictures
• PlayStation Productions
• 2.0 Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $60,000,000 (estimated)
• $44,428,554
• $17,410,552
• Aug 27, 2023
• $122,101,055

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 14 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• TMH Labs 10.2 Channel Sound
• IMAX 6-Track
• 12-Track Digital Sound
• Dolby Atmos

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Another Classic Sega Game Is Heading For A Big-Screen Adaptation

Stranger things season 5 can't forget about one great character, pirates of the caribbean reboot gets new update from its producer.

The current era of video game adaptations has delivered its share of hits and misses. One thing remains true: there are more than ever as Hollywood mines every IP it can. Gran Turismo , though, exists in a strange sort of limbo. It comes off as a blend of a fairly typical sports movie and an adaptation that can't help but draw attention to its source material. Unlike Uncharted or The Super Mario Bros. Movie , however, Gran Turismo plays more like a commercial for the game it's based on than an actual story.

That's not to say there isn't a story to tell, and it happens to be true to life. Gran Turismo dramatizes the racing career of Jann Mardenborough, a gamer who was so good at the games that he was given the chance to race in real life. Unfortunately, the nature of this tale means that Gran Turismo spends an inordinate amount of time trying to sell viewers on how great the racing sim series is. It does this instead of focusing on things a movie should include like fully developed characters and sensible storytelling.

RELATED: Gran Turismo 4 Cheat Codes Discovered Almost 20 Years Following Release

As if to let the audience know exactly what this movie is based on, Gran Turismo opens with a montage explaining the game series and how great it is. While it's true that the Gran Turismo series has received plenty of accolades for its gameplay and fidelity, a feature film opening with what amounts to an advertisement isn't a great choice. In somewhat of a lateral move, Gran Turismo then focuses on Jann Mardenborough (played by Midsommar 's Archie Madekwe) and his home life, which is rife with cliches. His dad (Djimon Hounsou, whose talent is mostly wasted in this fairly one-dimensional role) thinks he should be playing soccer instead of wasting his time on video games. His brother is the athlete, Jann should be more like him!

However, Jann has a real knack for racing, at least in simulated form, which lands him a spot at GT Academy. This training program for sim racers is engineered by Danny Moore ( played by former Legolas Orlando Bloom ) who is more concerned about how this will help Nissan's marketing than actually developing good racers. It's an odd choice to include a character whose sole motivation is profit-driven in a movie that includes two sequences whose sole purpose is to convince the audience that the Gran Turismo games are just really excellent racing simulators (to say nothing of all the other advertisements and product placement that worms its way into the film).

There's not much to be said about any of the other characters in Gran Turismo . There is ostensibly a villain in Josha Stradowski's Nicholas Capa, but beyond portraying him as a rich, aggressive, and arrogant jerk, there's not a lot of work put into making him a compelling antagonist. The same can be said for Jann's love interest Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley). One might think that in 2023 writers would consider putting slightly more work into writing better female characters , but Gran Turismo scribes Jason Hall and Zach Baylin are more than happy to just let Audrey exist in order to serve Jann's story. Her presence is weakened further by the fact that she apparently already has a thing for Jann, so he doesn't even have to work that hard to win her over.

The sole exception to the dearth of character work is Stranger Things star David Harbour as former racer Jack Salter. Salter is tasked with preparing Jann for the real world, even though he thinks the whole idea of training sim drivers is ludicrous. Harbour has a talent for playing grizzled, reluctant mentor figures, and he brings that energy to a role that might be considered one-note in the hands of someone else. Harbour imbues Salter's scenes with a sense of nostalgia, and he brings genuine emotion to dialogue that could easily come across as rote.

Gran Turismo does have some shine to it, and that's not a reference to all the meticulously polished cars that so often dominate the screen. Director Neill Blomkamp (who broke through with District 9 and dabbled in cyberpunk with Elysium ) makes up for some of the more workmanlike dialogue scenes with some pretty spectacular racing sequences. The camera flies through tracks and follows the racers in a way that makes their speed palpable. Inserts show the inner workings of the cars as they seem to defy the laws of physics and achieve unthinkable feats of driving. Blomkamp even manages to fit in some stylistic game flourishes with indicators showing Jann's position in each race (though these choices don't always hit, as in one sequence where Jann outruns a police car).

While Jann's story is true, it's hard not to feel some of the more overbaked sports movie clichés that work their way into the script. Jann is the underdog, nobody believes in him, but they should! He knows these cars inside and out, even if he's never actually been in one! He loses some, he wins some, and he fights his way up the ranks to show what he's made of. There are setbacks along the way (including one very tragic, true-to-life moment wedged into the middle of the story), but everyone wants to cheer Jann on (including his mom, played by former Spice Girl Geri Horner, whose appearance here is an easter egg for racing fans as she is married to Christian Horner of the Red Bull Racing Formula One team). Sports movies often fall back on their tropes , but that doesn't mean they can't be good. It's when they fully rely on those tropes without building anything else on them that they fall short, and that's where Gran Turismo lands most of the time.

Gran Turismo is not the worst video game adaptation of all time, but it barely feels like one anyway. Instead of having an existing story to adapt, like The Last of Us or even Sonic the Hedgehog , Gran Turismo instead uses a true story (one that is itself embellished, as Jann was not the first sim driver developed through GT Academy, nor was he the only successful one) to hawk its wares in the guise of an inspiring sports movie. Driving fans may get more out of this movie than the average audience member, but those looking for a compelling and memorable trip to the theater will probably want to hit the brakes.

Gran Turismo opens in theaters on August 25th.

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Gran Turismo

Based on the video game franchise and the true story surrounding it, Gran Turismo is a film adaptation arriving in 2023 from PlayStation Productions. The story will center around a teenage Gran Turismo player whose consistent winning streak in the games put him through a series of Nissan competitions, where he eventually became a real-life professional driver. 

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I have fond memories of the PS1 game, the original Gran Turismo . It was one of the first games that I ever played, and it contributed a lot to my understanding of the various car makes and models. It even introduced me to the art of drifting. Despite not playing it for over a decade, I can still vividly remember how many taps of the D-pad certain turns required, and I still hum Feeder’s “Sweet 16” when driving winding roads in real life. You better believe that I think of this game every time I’m in Bathurst and do a lap around Mount Panorama. This driving simulator turned me into a bit of a car geek for brief period of my life.  

Gran Turismo is the quiet achiever of the gaming world. When it comes to the car racing genre, it has seemingly always been there, unchallenged, always offering a superb and unparalleled simulated driving experience. Each iteration offers more cars, more tracks, more modifications, better graphics, and essentially more realism, but otherwise the game is an untouched masterpiece since its first release. The announcement of a new Gran Turismo game may not carry the same excitement as the appearance of a new narrative-based game from a popular franchise, but the brand still holds a sense of prestige.

A mainstay in gaming and for its genre, it’s no surprise that it has garnered a film adaptation. Though it does immediately fall into an oddball category given it’s a driving simulator and doesn’t necessarily have an in-game story. Given the brand’s involvement in the sport in real life, producers have taken the opportunity to adapt the story concerning the foundation of the GT Academy. It begs the question as to what this new film actually is: a biography or an adaptation of the game? Can it be considered a video game movie? Or is Gran Turismo a different beast entirely?

Content Guide

Violence/Scary Images: The film is about professional auto racing and delivers a realistic representation of the sport. Car engines blow, machines fail, cars flip and burn, and there are several crashes involving injuries and a fatality (the death is off screen). There are a lot of tense sequences where the camera follows tight, high-speed manoeuvres.

Language/Crude Humor: The f-bomb is dropped once or twice. Other swears are also said on occasion including the s-word.

Drug/Alcohol References: Drinking champagne is seen as a reward, so characters mention abstaining from the drink. However, they drink beer in social contexts. One character becomes too inebriated to drive.

Sexual Content: A character is accused of watching porn, however they are innocent. The film contains a heterosexual romance in which an unmarried couple end up kissing.

Spiritual Content: One particular race is described similarly to a spiritual experience.

Other Negative Content: The film makes light of an incident involving the theft of a car from a family member, negligent driving, and subsequently escaping a police pursuit.

Positive Content: The film contains a lot of respect for motorsports, and includes a message to follow one’s dreams, ignoring those that seek to tear you down. It encourages perseverance and hard work.

When it comes to game adaptations, Gran Turismo has got to be one of the weirdest. Firstly, as one of the characters mentioned in the film, it’s not really a game, but rather a simulation. The entire franchise is renowned for being one of the most realistic driving games on the market, and it has generated a lot of respect over the years for its serious dedication in bringing the sport of racing into people’s homes. There’s no plot to the Gran Turismo games, it’s just a matter of mastering the tracks and vehicles that are expertly rendered from their real-life examples. So, a film adaptation naturally ends up being a straight-up car racing movie. Secondly, unlike many other films based on games, Gran Turismo is in the unique position to offer an actual biography. The movie is based on the early career of Jann Mardenborough.

Gran Turismo ’s greatest challenge is not so much in knowing how to adapt the game, but rather how to succeed in producing a decent car racing movie. There have been two exceptional films about the sport over the past decade ( Rush and Ford v Ferrari ) and another handful that have pushed the limits of cinematography when it comes to capturing car chase sequences on the big screen ( Mad Max: Fury Road , Baby Driver , Drive, and the Bad Boys and Transformers franchise). It’s hard to do something new and stand out in this area now, due to films like Ford v Ferrari absolutely nailing their project brief.

Gran Turismo does take a while to get moving. It starts off as your typical “young adult has a dream that no one else believes or supports, and has to go on the Cinderella underdog journey to overcome adversity” story. It’s every low socioeconomic protagonist sport narrative you’ve seen before. The tricky issue with Gran Turismo is that the opposing voices of reason do have a point.

It’s no surprise that Gran Turismo takes a pro-gaming stance. The film inadvertently gives hope to the people that spend copious amounts of time gaming, essentially saying to those viewers to not give up their dreams. There are a lot of gamers, particularly in the younger generation, who would love to turn their gaming hobby into something financially viable, whether that’s a YouTube channel, game testing, or something else in that field, and Gran Turismo feeds into that desire. Yet it fails to remind audiences that Jann Mardenborough’s story is a unique case, and for every successful “Jann” there are millions of others who spent hundreds of hours driving tracks in the game with nothing much to show for it. So, when Jann’s family and peers all doubt his chance of success, comment that his dream is not exactly feasible, and his time can be better spent elsewhere, they do have a point. Pouring hours into gaming hurts more people than it helps, and addiction is real. Yet Gran Turismo isn’t in the position to deliver that reality check given the story it’s portraying.

To soften some parts of the narrative, the movie does commit the storytelling sin of telling and not showing. Supporting characters say that Jann spends hours in his room, playing the game, yet we really don’t see much of that lifestyle. Another flaw is that Jann’s described as being stiff in front of cameras, and essentially not great at interviews, and yet we don’t see much of that side of him either. It’s a nice little character quirk that might have been fun to explore, but Gran Turismo doesn’t deviate much from its route. Instead, it tries to get to the racing sequences as efficiently as possible, though it’s at the expense of the movie developing any sort of flavour along the way.

Yet once Gran Turismo does hit the track, the film finally finds its distinctive voice. The races are gamified, with pole positions illustrated just as they appear in the game, and with optimal racing lines imagined by the characters. One thing that’s sorely missing is a display of each course’s track; maps that are instantly recognizable for players that have spent any time with the game. It’s also disappointing that some of the original music and tunes aren’t given a nod in the score or sound design. That’s not to say the film’s soundtrack is not gripping or otherwise well-suited, just there was a missed opportunity there to pay some extra homage.

If there’s anything that Gran Turismo does well, then it’s how it doesn’t shy away from providing our protagonists setbacks and failures. This is not an easy journey for our characters, and by the end of the film, a great respect is developed for the sport. One particular moment in the story operates as a harsh gut punch where reality sets in, bringing about a key tonal change. It’s an interesting film in regard to stakes. At first they’re not really high—Jann merely competes as he’s always wanted to be involved in racing. Yet soon it shifts from being a personal goal to the simpler objective of finishing each race alive. Every session is a dance with death, and Gran Turismo really hammers in its admiration for those that engage in this sport.

Gran Turismo neatly summarizes an unusual moment in sport history, offering a standard feel-good story that’s highly respectful of everyone involved. If you don’t know about Jann Mardenborough’s career already, then it may be better to go in blind. Stories of this subgenre are typically easy to predict, so it’s enjoyable to experience the odd curveball when it’s thrown in this film, as there aren’t too many throughout the course of its runtime. Otherwise, Gran Turismo delivers what you would expect: an average biographical flick with a few tense driving sequences.

+ Solid feel-good story + Race sequences + Tense scenes + Compelling obstacles for the characters

- Lenient on game addiction and other problematic behaviours - First half feels generic - Some missed opportunities to adapt more game elements

The Bottom Line

Gran Turismo offers a decent car racing flick that does its best to bring a driving simulation to the big screen.

Juliana Purnell

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Movie reviews: It's hard to dislike a movie as relentlessly upbeat as 'Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story'

Gran turismo: based on a true story: 3 stars.

Sometimes truth is truly stranger than fact. “Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story,” a new anything-is-possible movie, now playing in theatres, is the unlikely, but true, story of Jann Mardenborough, a gamer who defied expectations in the real world.

“Listen son,” says his father Steve. “You think you’re going to play your stupid video games about cars, and you’re going to become a race car driver?”

When we first meet Jann (Archie Madekwe) he’s a 19-year-old underwear salesperson, who, when he isn’t selling briefs, spends his time playing Gran Turismo, a racing simulation video game that emulates the experience of elite car racing. He dreams of getting behind the wheel for real, but will his thousands of hours on the simulation translate to the real world?

He gets a chance to find out the answer to that question when Nissan motorsport executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) proposes a wild marketing idea. He wants to gather the best Gran Turismo players, train them at Nissan’s GT Academy, and, under the watchful eye of crusty trainer Jack Salter (David Harbour), enroll them in real life races. The winners of the competition will earn a spot on Team Nissan and a “place in history.” Jann’s high scores catch Moore’s attention, and after a qualifying simulation, Jann is off to the races. Literally.

Despite initial setbacks, the disdain of pit crews and the other drivers who consider him a novelty, a simulation driver playing in the big leagues, Jann excels and finds himself pitted against Europe’s finest drivers.

“Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story” is essentially a series of races with some family drama, a hint of romance, some twisted metal and flying tires and heaping loads of product placement and sports cliches wedged in between. It’s a crowd pleaser with some fist-in-the-air moments, but emotionally, it’s on cruise control. Director Neill Blomkamp never strays from the traditional underdog sports movie formula.

Mardenborough’s story is remarkable. Unfortunately, the telling of it isn’t as remarkable. It goes pedal to the metal on sports cliches—“I’m going to push you harder than you’ve ever been pushed before,” roars Salter— and follows the same path to the big race as many others have taken before.

But sports movies are never really only about the sport. They are about universal themes, like, in this case, an underdog following his dreams. On that score, “Gran Turismo” works well enough. The story itself is manipulative, but when the movie is speeding around a track at 200 miles an hour, it is an exciting manifestation of Mardenborough’s dreams coming true. When the characters are talking, it is more a cavalcade of cliches and easy exposition.

Of course, there are exceptions. For example, Mardenborough listens to soft rock to psyche himself for races, leading Salter to bellow, “You take all that Kenny G anger and you release it.” It’s a good, funny line and it ranks up there with my other favorite movie line, “I'm from Waterloo, where the vampires hang out,” from “Blackberry” earlier this year.

It’s hard to dislike a movie as relentlessly upbeat as “Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story.” As the cars whiz around the track it is all forward momentum in service of the inspiring story. It’s just a shame that the human parts of the tale aren’t as immersive as the racing scenes.

GOLDA: 3 STARS

“Golda,” a new biopic of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir is not a cradle-to-grave look at the life of the first woman in the world to serve as a head of government in a democratic country. Instead, the film, now playing in theatres, focuses on the eighteen days of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973.

Hidden under an inch or two of make-up, Helen Mirren plays the chain-smoking, 75-year-old Meir with equal parts fragility and steeliness. Confronted with the news that Syrian forces are gathering on the Golan Heights, she convenes a military consultation with Mossad chief Zvi Zamir (Rotem Keinan). Ignoring his warnings of imminent invasion, she approves full-scale mobilization but rejects a preemptive strike, fearing the perception of warmongering would affect Israel’s access to foreign aid and military support from their allies, especially the United States.

“My gut told me that war was coming and I ignored it,” she says. “I should have mobilized that night. All those boys who died, I will carry the pain of that to my grave.”

Told primarily in flashbacks— Israeli director Guy Nattiv uses Meir’s testimony to the Agranat Commission into the failings of the Israel Defense Forces in the prelude to the war as a framing device—“Golda” is actually the story of two battles, the Yom Kippur War against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and Meir’s struggle with cancer.

Narrowing the film down to the Yom Kippur War allows for a focused look at those events but feels like part two of three of the Golda Meir story. A life of the magnitude and influence of Meir’s deserves and requires historical context. Watching the truncated story of “Golda” I found myself wishing for a more detailed account à la “The Crown,” but without the soapy elements.

The casting of Mirren was controversial—critics said an Israeli or Jewish actor should have been hired to play Israel's most important female figure—but in Meir’s more intimate scenes, Mirren dives deep to portray the character’s many facets. Her eyes moisten at the reports of the horrors of war, she is resolute as the only woman in the room and, surprisingly, even humourous.

The film works best in Mirren’s scenes with Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber) and her assistant Lou Kaddar (Camille Cottin). Her cat-and-mouse with United States Secretary of State Kissinger is far more playful than you might imagine.

“I am first an American, second a secretary of state, third a Jew,” says Kissinger. “In this country,” Meir replies, “we read from right to left.”

DREAMIN’ WILD: 3 ½ STARS

“Dreamin’ Wild,” a new film based on real-life musicians Donnie and Joe Emerson, is a movie that examines failure and success, and the toll each takes on the recipients.

Growing up on a 1,600-acre farm in Fruitland, Washington, population 751, Donnie and Joe (played as teens by Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer) dreamt of becoming professional musicians. At age 15 and 17, respectively, they took a tentative step toward their goal, recording an album of Donnie’s songs in a makeshift studio on the back 40. Soulful, introspective and melodic, their soft-rock album “Dreamin’ Wild” was released to no fanfare and even less acclaim.

Cut to thirty years later. Donnie (now played by Casey Affleck) and his wife Nancy (Zooey Deschanel) make ends meet playing weddings while Joe (Walton Goggins) has given up the drums in favor of building houses. The flames of musical success are rekindled, however, when a copy of the album is rescued from a delete bin and falls into the hands of an indie label executive (Chris Messina) who believes in the music and wants to reissue the album.

The belated success—“To twist a Brian Wilson phrase,” raves online music publication Pitchfork, “[the album] is a godlike symphony to teenhood.”—uncorks a deep wellspring of emotion in Donnie. “I feel like this dream is coming true but the wrong people are in it,” he says.

Filled with regret at a musical life left unfulfilled, at the life-changing amount of money his father lost investing in his music and the toll his decisions made on Joe, he bubbles over with guilt and shame. “Seems like a lot of things were easier when I was a teenager,” he says.

“Dreamin’ Wild” is a slow burn of a movie, like a song that meanders through verse after verse after verse before getting to the chorus. The leisurely approach allows for Affleck’s trademarked sorrowful inner monologue to shine, to do the heavy lifting. His bittersweet performance pits Donnie’s ambitions against his anxieties, a combustible combo that results to one of the film’s highlights, a heartfelt reckoning between Donnie and his father (Beau Bridges). The scene is a quietly eloquent testament, beautifully performed, to music’s ability to bridge generational gaps and it is a highlight in a film that values understated moments.

Pohlad tells the story on a broken timeline, toggling back and forth between Donnie and Joe’s teen years and present day, creating a complete picture of Donnie’s artistic birth and the subsequent turmoil his commitment to music and his dashed dreams has caused over the years.

Anchored by Affleck’s performance, “Dreamin’ Wild’s” portrait of a tortured artist is like the music Donnie performs in the film; thoughtful, gentle and emotionally authentic.  

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Gran Turismo review: a racing biopic that runs out of gas

“Gran Turismo is part advertisement, part racing biopic. Mostly, though, it's duller than it has any right to be.”

• One memorable, midpoint racing sequence
• Charismatic, if one-note, supporting performances
• A formulaic, by-the-numbers script
• Neill Blomkamp's artless direction
• A cast of one-note, uninteresting characters

When watching Gran Turismo , Sony and Neill Blomkamp’s new, true-story take on the popular PlayStation franchise, it’s hard not to think of the excellent 2019 Christian Bale movie Ford v Ferrari . Both films not only center on real-life racers, but also feature extended climaxes set at a 24-hour race at Le Mans and revolve largely around the friendship between a professional driver and his chief engineer. There are even images throughout Gran Turismo that look strikingly similar to scenes from the earlier James Mangold-directed, Oscar-nominated film and that are structured similarly.

Despite everything that the two films have in common, though, Gran Turismo lacks the heart that made it easy for viewers to invest in Ford v Ferrari ’s story. As a matter of fact, it lacks any real artistic identity. That will likely come as a surprise to those familiar with Blomkamp’s past films, which have occasionally suffered from the bluntness of his voice and his overbearing visual style. Both of those traits are absent from Gran Turismo , a film about competitive racing that spins its wheels — going nowhere emotionally or thematically for the majority of its runtime.

It should go without saying at this point that Gran Turismo is based on a true story. The film’s marketing materials have repeatedly reinforced that fact in an attempt to sell Gran Turismo not as just another video game adaptation, but as a dramatization of a unique, real-life rise to glory. In this case, said rise belongs to Jann Mardenborough (played in the film by Archie Madekwe), a British-born gamer who received the chance of a lifetime in 2011 when his skills as a Gran Turismo player resulted in Nissan and Sony giving him the opportunity to become a professional racing driver.

Jason Hall and Zach Baylin’s script frames Mardenborough’s journey as a dream-come-true story that confirms the value of believing in one’s self, no matter what anyone else might say. Over the course of the film, Madekwe’s Mardenborough is forced to tune out the criticisms and warnings of not only his skeptical father, Steve (an underserved Djimon Hounsou), but also Jack Salter (David Harbour), the racer-turned-chief engineer hired by Nissan marketing executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) to try and turn Jann and several of his fellow, talented gamers into race car drivers.

The problem is that Jann never meets all that much resistance to his dreams throughout Gran Turismo . Despite how repetitive it makes the early arguments between him and his father, the film remains content to simply follow its hero as he surely and quickly rises through the world of professional racing. The one true hurdle it throws at Jann involves the dramatization of a real-life automobile crash that reworks the timeline and details of the event in ways that will likely inspire some intense scrutiny from anyone who looks into it.

Ultimately, for a film that repeatedly stresses how challenging and demanding driving an actual race car can be, Gran Turismo fails to make the effort involved in its central sport truly felt. The film, consequently, doesn’t tell a dramatically engaging story so much as it recaptures the sense of linear progression offered by video games. The longer it remains content with simply following the basic motions of its plot, the more one gets the sense of just how lifeless Gran Turismo really is.

As seat-shakingly loud as it can get, Blomkamp’s film never invests enough time in the emotion and drama of its hero’s story to make any of his successes or rare setbacks feel earned or impactful. The by-the-numbers nature of Gran Turismo ’s plotting leaves many of its characters and performances feeling disappointingly one-note. Try as he might, Madekwe struggles to bring real, emotional depth to his fictionalized version of Mardenborough, who frequently feels more like a blank video game protagonist than he does an earnest, multidimensional dreamer.

Madekwe only truly shines during one third-act scene between him and Hounsou that’s undeniably well-performed, but also undercut by how underdeveloped their characters are throughout Gran Turismo . Opposite Madekwe, both Harbour and Bloom give charismatic performances as characters who similarly feel more like bland archetypes than they do flesh-and-blood human beings. By focusing so intently on getting through as many of its plot points as it can, Gran Turismo sands off the edges of its characters and their stories — rendering them as the dullest possible versions of themselves.

Behind the camera, Blomkamp never brings a distinct artistic perspective to Gran Turismo . Even worse, the film is so in love with its rich corporations and products that it’s hard to believe Blomkamp, whose previous movies include numerous scathing critiques of corporate culture and greed, actually chose to direct it. In today’s media landscape, it’s hard to accuse any one filmmaker of selling out, so it doesn’t seem fair to pin that particular criticism on Blomkamp of all directors. However, acknowledging the reality of the current Hollywood system doesn’t take away from the fact that, like Barbie , Air , and Flamin’ Hot  before it, Gran Turismo feels more like an advertisement than it does a piece of blockbuster entertainment.

The film is a weightless racing biopic that desperately wants you to buy into not only the journey of its hero, but also the roles that companies like Nissan and Sony played in making his dreams come true. Gran Turismo never accomplishes either of those things. On the surface, it may try to pass itself off as an inspiring sports drama, but when you look under its hood, there’s nothing there but faulty wiring and a blown-out engine. Ford v Ferrari  it is most definitely not.

Gran Turismo is playing in select theaters now. It opens nationwide on Friday, August 25.

Editors’ Recommendations

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The streaming service Tubi is like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's great because as a free ad-supported streaming service (FAST) service, you can access tons of movies, entirely for free. But on the other hand, some of these movies, especially the most high-profile ones, come and go faster than you can say "hit play." Thus, when you find a great movie that's available, plan to watch it as soon as you can because it could be gone from one month to the next.

That's why we decided to put together this list of not just the best movies on Tubi but the best movies on Tubi right now. That means every movie on this list is on the free streamer as we speak, ready for your viewing pleasure. Call you friends or family or curl up with a bag of popcorn and a cold drink and enjoy before it's gone!

August continues to bring the summer heat, so it's a good thing that there's no shortage of great TV to watch from the comfort of your own home. On Netflix, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is the new breakout hit for the streamer, while Max's House of the Dragon is still entrancing viewers who are still hungry for small-screen spectacle.

Crime is still a popular genre, and British crime in particular is a favorite for many. This August, these three under-the-radar shows are worth your time and attention.

Guy Ritchie and Henry Cavill reunited this year for the criminally underrated yet wholly entertaining war comedy The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. The film makes good use of their strongest qualities, but it doesn't quite compare to their first collaboration together, 2015's The Man From U.N.C.L.E.  Based on the eponymous TV show, the movie follows two spies, American Napoleon Solo (Cavill) and Russian Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) who must reluctantly work together to stop an Italian socialite from starting World War III.

Fun, stylish to a fault, and featuring arguably the best performance of Henry Cavill's career, The Man From U.N.C.L.E is Ritchie's best movie of the 2010s and probably his best since Snatch. Sadly, it was a box office flop and received so-so reviews at the time. However, time has been quite kind to it, turning it into a modern action classic, to the point where Rolling Stone named it the 50th best action movie of all time. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is currently streaming on Netflix, and if you haven't seen it, now's the perfect time. If you need more convincing, here are four reasons to stream this incredibly rewatchable film. Henry Cavill plays the best spy you've never heard of

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The Gran Turismo movie drives a real-life story into gamer cringe territory

Jann Mardenborough’s gamer-to-racer arc is inspiring, but the movie is fighting an old culture war

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by Oli Welsh

A little way into the movie Gran Turismo, the unlikely brand extension of Sony’s sim racing games accidentally satirizes itself. “This whole thing is a marketing extravaganza!” excitable auto executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) shouts at salty racing coach Jack Salter (David Harbour). They’re aboard a helicopter wheeling above a racetrack, where Salter’s students in the GT Academy — a real-life program intended to turn players of Sony’s Gran Turismo games into actual racing drivers — are being put through their paces. The helicopter is an absurd bit of theater for the TV cameras, and Salter knows it. But he’s powerless to resist the marketing apparatus around him.

So are the people behind the Gran Turismo movie. The familiar phrase “based on a true story” is slathered all over its marketing — in some cases, even presented as part of the film’s official title. That awkward straining for legitimacy echoes throughout the film. In a year when confident, authentic video game adaptations have risen to the top of the heap both in theatrical release and on television , and Greta Gerwig has turned cinema-as-sponcon into a multifaceted art form , Sony’s movie brings us crashing back down to Earth.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp ( District 9 and Elysium director, tech innovator , and wannabe video game creator ), Gran Turismo is a broad, trashy, true-ish sports drama that has a lot less in common with The Last of Us or The Super Mario Bros. Movie than it does with triumph-of-the-brand advertorial like Air , Ben Affleck’s biography of a sneaker . Its closest cousin is Tetris , Apple’s retelling of Nintendo’s tussle with the Soviet Union over the marketing rights to the classic puzzle game. Just like Tetris , Gran Turismo solves the conundrum of how to adapt a game without any characters: by unearthing a compelling human story behind it. And just like Tetris , it strays pretty far from both truth and plausibility in its overcooked take on real-life events — then self-consciously frames those events with video game-y graphics, to remind everyone of their unreal inspiration.

Gran Turismo is a fictionalized account of the rise of Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a British teen who dreamed of being a racing driver as he played racing games in his bedroom, then made that dream into a reality. In 2011, he won the GT Academy’s top prize: a contract to drive for a real Nissan motorsports team. Since then, he built a reasonable career as a pro: He raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans several times, and went on to compete in Japan’s Super GT series.

The movie compresses, reorders, and massages the details of his story until they (a) resemble the tried-and-true beats of a sports biopic, and (b) serve the needs of the production’s marketing partners. After all, it wouldn’t do to show Mardenborough practicing on a period-appropriate PlayStation 3 rather than a modern-era PS5, or driving open-wheel Formula 3 cars around dreary British motordromes instead of racing a branded Nissan around glitzy Abu Dhabi. The movie has some laughable inventions, like a police chase around the streets of Cardiff that’s more Grand Theft Auto than Gran Turismo. (“Cop avoidance achieved!” shouts the on-screen graphic.)

But the big moments are all true, or true enough. The GT Academy program was indeed the brainchild of a Nissan U.K. marketing exec, who had to convince both Gran Turismo mastermind Kazunori Yamauchi and Nissan’s motorsports division of its genius. That actual exec, Darren Cox, may not have looked as slick as Orlando Bloom does in the role, but he was as persuasive a salesman. (Still is, if his producer credit alongside Mardenborough and Yamauchi is anything to go by.) Mardenborough did indeed score third place in his class at Le Mans, compete in an all-GT Academy team of sim drivers, and survive a horrific accident, as the film shows — albeit not in the order the film shows it, or under the circumstances the filmmakers contrive.

There is one particularly troubling aspect to the way American Sniper co-writer Jason Hall and Creed III co-writer Zach Baylin frame the accident, a freak occurrence at the Nürburgring circuit that killed a spectator. While the crash did happen pretty much as depicted, Hall and Baylin’s screenplay time-shifts it in order to stage it as a defining, motivating setback on Mardenborough’s hero’s journey to his Le Mans podium. The actual accident happened years later — arguably a tasteless reframing of a fatal event.

The film’s best invention is Harbour’s character — chief engineer Jack Salter, whom Nissan drafts to train the young racers and keep them safe. There’s nothing original about the character or his arc: He’s a cussed has-been who coulda been a contender, straight out of the sports-movie playbook. But Harbour invests him with an ornery warmth, and he both works up all the biggest laughs and creates the film’s most touching moments with Madekwe.

The film’s script reduces most other characters to ciphers whose only role is to illustrate one gamer’s rise to greatness. The most egregious example of this is perfunctory love interest Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley). Mardenborough’s parents, Steve (Djimon Hounsou, wearing his most disapproving frown) and Lesley (a rather sweet Geri Halliwell-Horner — yes, Ginger Spice) might have had more to them in some drafts, but they’re given short shrift in the edit.

Meanwhile, Gran Turismo fans will enjoy seeing Yamauchi (as played by Giri/Haji ’s Takehiro Hira) gazing stoically upon press conferences, racing cars, and the curve of the asphalt. The film’s relationship to the games is the oddest thing about it. It opens with a minutes-long ad for the series, and closes with credits featuring manufactured footage of Polyphony Digital engineers scanning in cars’ bodywork and recording their engines’ growls, as if the games’ authenticity still needed underlining. The script is awash with back-of-the-box talking points about the games’ realism, while sound effects and graphics get callouts.

And the movie’s whole premise is the realization of Yamauchi’s long-held dream that his love of cars and motorsports could bleed out of his games and enter the real world. In his pitch meeting at the start of the movie, Danny’s lament about the decline of car culture — “people would rather be on their phone in the back of an Uber than behind the wheel” — could have come directly from Yamauchi’s most recent press tour .

And yet there’s nothing of the games’ spirit here. Gran Turismo games express their automotive passion in a way that’s scholarly, precise, tasteful, and a little quirky. They’re scored with elevator jazz and presented with exquisite finesse. They find their excitement in moments of thrilling verisimilitude: reflections gliding across paintwork or car suspensions shuddering over curbs. By contrast, Blomkamp’s movie is brash and amped-up. (Though it does have a pretty good running joke involving the Muzak stylings of Enya and Kenny G.) His direction of the racing scenes (much of them shot practically rather than built digitally ) apes camera angles from the games, but cuts them together in a frenetic, noisy style that’s enthralling at the start of the film and wearyingly samey by the end. It honestly feels more like a Forza or Need for Speed movie than a Gran Turismo adaptation.

Worse, the games’ cool self-possession is completely lost amid the insecure gamer power fantasy that has blighted video game-themed movies from Pixels and Ready Player One in the 2010s all the way back to The Wizard and The Last Starfighter in the 1980s. In this fantasy, a nerdy boy gets mocked for playing with his joystick in his bedroom, but he eventually uses gaming skills to save the day, win the prize, and get the hot girl, proving the doubters (usually his parents) wrong. Mardenborough’s story is unfortunately a perfect vehicle for this narrative, and the filmmakers lean into it in the most cringeworthy way — not just in the cheesy graphics and lines like “How are we doing, gamers?” and “Press play, dude!” but in setting up the primary antagonist as a preening racer who leads an entirely fictitious campaign against sim drivers infiltrating the sport.

Gamers aren’t an oppressed minority anymore — if they ever were in any venue outside of their own heads and the media reflecting their fantasies. This kind of aggrieved posturing isn’t a good look in 2023. Geek culture won. Mardenborough’s story is real, and has a much more significant dimension than victory in some imagined gaming culture war. Games gave this kid from a low-income family a viable and affordable route into one of the world’s most elitist sports. Gran Turismo could have used this inspiring true story to show how video games open up possibilities and remove barriers in the real world. Instead, it just uses it to score points.

Gran Turismo opens in U.S. theaters on Aug. 25.

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‘Gran Turismo’ Review: Once Upon a Pair of Sticks

A popular racing video game series gets turned into an underdog sports drama in this big-screen adaptation.

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By Nicolas Rapold

Since the late 1990s, the Gran Turismo racing games for PlayStation have brought in billions of dollars, rivaling the box-office bounties of some movie franchises. It was only a matter of time before a movie offshoot arrived, following in the tracks of other live-action adaptations of PlayStation games, including last year’s “Uncharted.” “Gran Turismo” the movie tells the true (but unlikely) story of Jann Mardenborough, a Gran Turismo maven who became a professional racer of actual cars on actual tracks.

Mardenborough’s leap from pixels to asphalt was an effective advertisement for Gran Turismo as more than a game, but his transition wasn’t all smooth. In the director Neill Blomkamp’s dutiful telling, Jann (Archie Madekwe), a teenager from Cardiff, Wales, faces doubters and steep learning curves to go with the racetrack curves. His underdog story — can this digital driver make it in the real world? — doubles as an old-fashioned tale of a young man proving his worth to his family and other skeptics.

Madekwe’s Jann is so unassuming that every step in his journey comes as a pleasant surprise. After Jann’s father (Djimon Hounsou) says there’s no future in gaming and brings Jann to his job at a rail yard, Jann goes off and wins a contest held by Nissan to recruit promising Gran Turismo players. (His mother, played by Geri Halliwell Horner, is a bit more encouraging.) He earns a spot in the company’s racing academy, which is overseen by a hard-nosed engineer, Jack (David Harbour), and an unctuous marketer, Danny (Orlando Bloom). Once again Jann exceeds expectations and beats out a more TV-ready competitor for the chance to race professionally.

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‘Gran Turismo’ Review: Neill Blomkamp Dares to Redefine What Video Game Commercials Can Be

Christian zilko.

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After taking on apartheid and economic inequality with “District 9” and “Elysium,” Neill Blomkamp was finally prepared to make a film about the world’s most oppressed social class: gamers.

It’s also a thrilling retelling of one of the craziest stories in recent sports history, shot with the level of skillful spectacle that the source material demands. Blomkamp might have directed the best 90-minute sports movie of the decade — it’s just a shame that “Gran Turismo” is nearly two and a half hours. Related Stories ‘Greedy People’ Review: Joseph Gordon-Levitt Carries a Coen Brothers Knockoff That Has No Right to Be This Fun Paul Schrader Announces Two New Projects, Says His Recent Films ‘Have All Been Turned Down by Amazon, Netflix’

For as long as he could remember, Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) wanted nothing more than to be a race car driver. But his working-class background proved an insurmountable barrier to entering the sport, which typically requires access to fast cars and expensive tracks from a young age to achieve real success. He only had one window into the racing world to keep his dream alive: “Gran Turismo.” The popular PlayStation game, which launched in 1997, offers gamers a hyper-realistic driving simulator that allows them to explore the nuances of specific cars and iconic tracks like Le Mans. The attention to detail is so great that many racing enthusiasts believed a serious study of the game could be a foundation for an actual racing career.

Against his family’s wishes, Jann heads to the academy to seek his fortune. But he quickly begins to bristle with his classmates and Jack Salter (David Harbour), a washed up former driver who has reluctantly agreed to oversee the program in one last attempt to return to racing glory. As he attempts to break Jann’s spirit to shape him into an elite driver, the young “Gran Turismo” enthusiast begins to realize that the entire racing world is rooting against him. Everyone from fans and announcers to his own coaches and mechanics believe that “sim racers” have no business competing against traditional drivers. It becomes clear that Jann has to go to battle for a cause that’s much bigger than himself: convincing the world that pretending to drive a car is the same thing as driving a car.

This would all be a lot less confusing if Blomkamp had done us the courtesy of turning in something mediocre. But “Gran Turismo” is what happens when talented filmmakers take on ridiculous projects and do a great job. Cinephiles used to have the luxury of knowing that the art and craft of filmmaking were somewhat linked — studios would always make shameless cash grabs, but at least you could assume that they’d hire bad directors and hamstring them with bad notes. But “Gran Turismo” is proof that great craftsmanship can occur in artistically barren settings.

With every CPG brand trying to turn itself into a trendy content studio at the same time that our best auteurs struggle to find funding for original projects, there could be many more movies like this on the horizon. Imagine if Damien Chazelle makes another criminally misunderstood flop and has to helm Mattel’s UNO movie to get out of directing jail. His playfully frenetic camera could whip from player to player as they draw cards in perfect time with a bouncy Justin Hurwitz score. You’d be watching elite filmmaking, even within the confines of something utterly uninspired.

A Sony Pictures release, “Gran Turismo” opens in select theaters on Friday, August 11 before expanding nationwide on Friday, August 25.

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The Gran Turismo Movie Tells a Remarkable True Story—With One Big Exception

The movie, now streaming on Netlfix, dramatizes Jann Mardenborough’s unlikely rise from video gamer to professional driver.

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The British 31-year-old’s unlikely path from gamer to real-life racer is the subject of the new movie Gran Turismo , based on the popular Playstation series of the same name. The movie—which is now streaming on Netflix and stars Archie Madekwe as Mardenborough, Orlando Bloom , and David Harbour—tells a dramatized version of how a teenaged Mardenborough beat more than 90,000 players around the world in the 2011 GT Academy to become a professional driver.

Here’s what you need to know about Mardenborough’s unlikely rise and how the film takes creative liberty with one of the most horrifying moments of the racer’s career.

Early Racing Dreams

Whereas his father, Steve, was a former professional soccer player, Jann dreamed of holding a steering wheel from an early age. He grew up in Cardiff, Wales, and when he went to a local go-kart track at age 8 with Steve, he even impressed the track’s owner .

But within three years, the track closed down, and Mardenborough gave up racing because it was too expensive. “I didn’t do any karting, I didn’t know anyone in motorsport,” he said in a 2016 interview with Car Throttle . “So it became just a dream, just a goal which is so unachievable.”

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Described by his mother as “quite a home boy,” the shy Mardenborough instead retreated to his bedroom to play Gran Turismo . Unlike other arcade-style racing titles, the game series—which debuted in 1997 for the original Playstation console—is meant to accurately simulate the look and feel of driving a race car. On modern consoles, the experience is almost photorealistic.

This was Mardenborough’s only outlet to live out his racing dreams until age 19, when Nissan and Sony Computer Entertainment’s GT Academy would change his life forever.

Proving His Skills on the Track

Mardenborough entered the hybrid gaming-driving competition, which offered a contract in the 2012 Dubai 24 Hour race to the winner. The first six weeks were completely virtual, with players asked to lay down their fastest laps on Gran Turismo 5 . Mardenborough, who had a simulator rig complete with pedals and a steering wheel, said he played as much as five hours a day. By the end, he advanced as the 11 th ranked player in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

In the next round, Mardenborough drove an actual car at the Brands Hatch circuit in southeast England. He was one of two participants to advance to the final portion at Silverstone, which hosts the annual Formula 1 British Grand Prix. After more cuts were made, he was one of only four drivers left to compete in a winner-take-all race on the Silverstone circuit. “The only time I thought I’d have a chance of winning was when I qualified first,” he told Car Throttle . “It was just impossible. You don’t think about that stuff.”

Sure enough, he won and moved to Silverstone for a six-month development program to earn his international driver’s license. Mardenborough quickly proved his success wasn’t a fluke by finishing third in class at both the Dubai 24 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans—arguably the world’s most prestigious auto race—a year later in 2013.

Since then, Mardenborough has competed in various racing series, including Formula 3, GT3, British GT, and Super GT. “The downforce, the G-force, the vibrations—it’s intoxicating bliss for me,” Mardenborough told The Irish Times in a recent interview. “Your body takes a pounding. Your heart rate is a minimum of 150 beats per minute. And it stays at that rate for hours. And you can burn 1,000 calories in two hours. It’s not just sitting down and driving. You are really wrestling a machine.”

The Crash at Nürburgring

While the Gran Turismo movie focuses on Mardenborough’s discovery and development, it also features an infamous accident involving the driver. In March 2015, Mardenborough was competing in a GT3 sportscar at Germany’s Nürburgring Nordschleife course when his car became airborne and flew over safety barriers. Multiple spectators were injured by the car and flying debris, and one person died in the accident.

Mardenborough, who was shockingly uninjured, called it “the darkest moment of my personal and professional life” and implored director Neill Blomkamp to include it in the film. The crash is depicted, but early screenings revealed it’s shown out of chronological order—more specifically, prior to his impressive run at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2013—for narrative effect.

Despite this significant change, which Polygon reviewer Oli Welsh called a “tasteless reframing of a fatal event,” Mardenborough continues to stand by the scene’s inclusion. “The producers and the writers made sure, and I made sure, that it was meticulously done correctly,” he told Daily Express US . “And the movie does a really good job at representing that. Not only the way it happened but also the aftermath. Because it was like that.”

Watch Gran Turismo on Netflix

Watch Archie Madekwe put the pedal to the metal as Jann Mardenborough in Gran Turismo , which also stars David Harbour as his trainer.

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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Gran Turismo: Movie Review

• Maxance Vincent
• August 12, 2023

Despite a predictable structure, Neill Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo entertains thanks to some dazzling racing sequences and good supporting performances from David Harbour and Orlando Bloom.

*This review of the movie Gran Turismo was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.*

After the nearly-unwatchable Demonic , Neill Blomkamp ’s directorial future was in flux. The South African/Canadian filmmaker made a splash in 2009 when his adaptation of the short film Alive in Joburg , District 9 , was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. His subsequent efforts didn’t live up to how intelligent and thrilling his breakout hit was (though Elysium is severely underappreciated), and his last movie was a total disaster. After watching Demonic , I never imagined Blomkamp directing another movie, let alone a blockbuster, ever again.

But Sony has given him another chance by adapting Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo and bringing the true story of Jann Mardenborough’s (Archie Madewke) real-life “from gamer to racer” story on the big screen. Some will argue that the film is an egregious attempt at cross-promotion, with Blomkamp and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret incorporating 3D graphics inside Jann’s real-life world to plunge viewers into gameplay footage of Gran Turismo 7 . Of course, with PlayStation Studios producing the film and Sony (once again) utilizing their products in the movie, it does teeter the line of an advertisement. 

I’ll admit that the “gameplay” parts are discombobulating, particularly during a real-life car chase scene where Jann imagines himself playing Gran Turismo to avoid being arrested by the police. The visual cue wrapping up the car chase is funny, especially for anyone who played Gran Turismo , but the execution isn’t very polished. Whenever the film goes into the “3D” world, seemingly inside Jann’s head, it recalls Blomkamp’s use of volumetric capture in Demonic , which was the only visually interesting part of that movie. It’s interesting to see how he translates the gaming portion of the movie for a cinematic look and feel, but it doesn’t work in its overall presentation.

And then there’s the story , which is as predictable as they come . Of course, the movie emphasizes that it is based on a true story (as they’ve retitled the movie Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story for absolutely no reason) and chronicles Jann’s real-life underdog story as he wins a Gran Turismo competition changing his life in ways he couldn’t possibly imagine. A Nissan executive (Orlando Bloom) wants to test the theory that avid Gran Turismo players can race a car due to the game’s painstaking realism. The film’s opening text shows creator Kazunori Yamauchi (played in the film by Takehiro Hira) racing a car to capture the game’s movements. Because of this quest for ultra-realism, the Gran Turismo games are lauded by gamers and professional racers. 

With chief engineer Jack Salter (David Harbour), Nissan Academy trains elite Gran Turismo players to compete in the 24hrs of Le Mans, the world’s most challenging endurance race competition . Of course, Salter doesn’t believe that the gamers will ever make it to Le Mans, let alone qualify for a license. Jann eventually wins the competition at Nissan Academy, and the beats stay as predictable as they come. We have our traditional montage that shows his success until we see another race in full that will (undoubtedly) show him at his lowest emotional point…until the climax raises the stakes so high to make the audience believe in the impossible… even if his triumph at Le Mans has been well-documented. 

The movie also tries to pit a rivalry against Jann and “real” racers , including Nicholas Capa (Josha Stradowski) and his father Patrice (Thomas Kretschmann). However, both of these antagonists are amazingly underdeveloped. An interesting father/son relationship slightly harkens back to how John Kreese treated Johnny Lawrence in the original Karate Kid . Still, it’s too brief for it to make an impact.

I will say that Stradowski does nail the part of a cartoonishly evil racer who believes he is the best and will do anything to stay on top and ensure gamers don’t get a place on the podium, even if it means crashing Jann’s car. But from our small moments with him, Blomkamp ensures the audiences hate his guts. The actual father/son relationship between Jann and his dad Steve (Djimon Hounsou) is also terribly clichéd – his father does not believe that his son will amount to anything by playing Gran Turismo all day… until he is proven wrong. That arc has been done to death in many movies, but Hounsou ’s portrayal of Jann’s father is very effective. You could hear a couple of tears in the audience in some of the film’s more emotional scenes with the two. 

Madewke is also quite good as Mardenborough but doesn’t seem as invested in the story as David Harbour and Orlando Bloom do. Bloom’s pronunciation of “Nissan” will forever be iconic, and Harbour ’s portrayal of Salter brings much-needed emotional depth to the movie, balancing out Madewke’s more one-note take on Mardenborough. He is very good in the car, literally and figuratively fighting for his life, but not so much during scenes requiring more introspective acting. 

While the flaws in Gran Turismo seem to stick out like a sore thumb, they can also be easily brushed off when the film becomes a full-throttle racing blockbuster . The 24hrs of Le Mans sequence doesn’t seem very inspiring for those who have seen James Mangold’s Ford v. Ferrari , but it’s also shot differently and executed in a far more visually exciting way. Blomkamp and Jouffret strap Sony CineAlta Venice 2 IMAX cameras on an FPV drone and capture some of the most jaw-dropping racing photography ever put on a film. The drones swish on the large crowd, plunge into the track, and follow the cars as they zip through the race in extreme, death-defying speed. When a car crashes and catches fire, the stakes are raised even higher, and you’re automatically put on the edge of your seat, as Jann knows the dangers of real-life racing. 

This is a film you need to see on the biggest screen possible , preferably IMAX, which puts you faster in the car seat than any other format would ever do. When the cars go vroom, and the FPV drone flips over a dangerous (practical) accident, it feels as if Blomkamp has created a new cinematic language in representing the thrills (and dangers) of racing. He seems heavily inspired by Michael Bay’s Ambulance (which is a very good thing), which pioneered FPV drone photography in mainstream cinema. Racing has always been the most cinematic sport to capture for a feature film. Still, when a director decides to push the boundaries of a racing sequence and innovate in its structure and cinematography , that’s when it gets more exciting. 

Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda will also attempt to reinvigorate racing through their upcoming Formula One movie starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris, where they will put cameras directly in race cars like they did for Top Gun: Maverick with planes. It’ll certainly be another movie to watch in how the filmmaker approaches a racing scene, but Blomkamp has one hell of a head start with Gran Turismo . It isn’t perfect, and strong moments of earnestness are sometimes hampered by what looks like an advertisement for the game. However, witnessing the film in IMAX is an absolute show-stopper and consistently fun to watch with a crowd invested in the proceedings. Due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, the movie has been delayed from August 11 to August 25, but special screenings will continue until its wide release.

Gran Turismo is now showing globally in select theaters, and will be released everywhere from August 25 .

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